Modelleisenbahn keeps track of customer signals with COC IT-Services

To read a German version of this case study, click here.

Modelleisenbahn GmbH is a leading European manufacturer of model railways. The company was formed as a result of a merger between two of Europe’s largest model railway brands: Roco and Fleischmann. Headquartered near Salzburg in Austria, the company has locations in Germany, Slovakia and Romania, and has 800 employees.

The company’s business model relies on a highly mobile sales team, who spend much of their time travelling around toy shops across Europe and generating sales orders. While Roco and Fleischmann were separate companies, their individual sales teams were relatively small, and neither organisation had seen the need to invest in a centralised CRM solution to manage customer information. After the merger, however, the combined sales team faced much more complex challenges: a broader product portfolio and a larger customer-base meant that the introduction of a CRM solution became important to support business growth.

“Basically, our sales team was quite isolated from the rest of the organisation,” explains Wilfried Kreuzbauer, Head of IT at Modelleisenbahn GmbH. “When a salesperson had a meeting with a customer, there was no standardised way for them to record what happened – so it was difficult for sales managers at headquarters to find out what was happening on the road. Equally, if a salesperson wanted to know the latest sales data, stock levels or product information, they had to call or email someone at headquarters and ask for it – they couldn’t connect to our central systems directly.”

Building on Lotus Notes and Domino
The Modelleisenbahn IT team began looking for a solution, and analysed the key requirements.

“First, we wanted a system that would be easy for sales teams to use, and that would fit in with our existing IT landscape,” says Kreuzbauer. “Everyone in the company uses Lotus Notes and Domino for email and calendaring, so we wanted to find a solution that would build on our investment in the platform. Second, to allow the sales team to access sales and product data, we needed the solution to be able to integrate with our Infor Baan ERP system, which runs on the IBM Informix database platform.”

Finding the right solution
Modelleisenbahn consulted COC IT-Services, an IBM Premier Business Partner based in Salzburg. COC IT-Services was already Roco’s main IT partner, and the Modelleisenbahn IT team knew that the company offered a Lotus Domino CRM solution.

“We didn’t want a complex, expensive, enterprise-level CRM solution – we wanted a simple solution that we could extend as our business needs grow,” explains Kreuzbauer. “When COC IT-Services showed us their CRM application, we realised that it would be ideal for our needs: it’s easy to implement, but it also has a sophisticated template management system that enables quick customisation and development of new features by leveraging XPages.”

A rapid implementation
The implementation took just five months, including integration with the Infor ERP Baan solution.

“We were delighted with the way COC IT-Services handled the project, because five months is a very short overall time for such an implementation,” comments Kreuzbauer. “It helps that we have built a very close relationship with their team, and they have a detailed understanding of our business. They are also very responsive: if we ever have a problem, they are there for us when we call.”

User-friendly interface
In the two months since the initial go-live, the IT team has been rolling the solution out to users at headquarters and on the sales teams. It is already popular with early adopters, and usage levels are rising all the time. One reason for this is that the solution should be easy to use: employees are already familiar with Lotus Notes applications, and the interface for the CRM system has been designed using a new Lotus Domino feature: XPages.

XPages provides a new way of designing interfaces for Lotus applications, enabling a high degree of flexibility and rich functionality, whether the user accesses application via the Lotus Notes client or via a web browser. For Modelleisenbahn sales teams, who do much of their work on laptops or home PCs, this flexibility is useful: even if they don’t have access to a Lotus Notes client, they can still log into the system.

“The look and feel of the interface is much more modern and intuitive with XPages,” says Kreuzbauer. “For example, our old sales visit reports used to take a long time to fill in and were unpopular. Now we have used XPages to build a new sales visit questionnaire, which the sales team find much easier to use.”

Maximising sales opportunities
“Already we have seen some interesting results from the project,” says Kreuzbauer. “The sales team have told us that the ability to review sales data from the ERP system before customer meetings gives them a distinct advantage: for example, they can see which products each customer usually buys, which helps them spot opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. It is too early to analyse the figures, but since the implementation our sales revenue certainly seems to have increased.”

Office-based employees have also reported several benefits from the solution. Since sales teams can now usually find the data they need directly, there is less need for them to call headquarters and ask for help. This means that the office staff should be able to spend less time finding information and sending out reports, and can focus on more productive tasks.

Greater insight into operations
Equally, since the sales staff are now obliged to log information about all customer interactions in the system, sales managers can more easily gain a detailed overview of all sales activity – helping them monitor performance and make more effective decisions.

“This CRM solution from COC IT-Services proves the utility of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino as a platform for applications that can help deliver real business value,” concludes Kreuzbauer. “As we extend the solution we hope to introduce analytics that will help provide even greater insight into our sales operations.”