Success Story Manufacturing
Transformation via Agile & Salesforce
This large, publicly-traded modular manufacturing company is North America’s leading site solutions provider — specializing in custom mobile offices, storage, classrooms, and more.
The company faced two distinct and unrelated challenges in the business.
One was a productivity problem due to a lack of communication across business units caused by siloed work structures. This led to poor strategic planning, inefficient resource and staff allocation, and friction between departments.
North America’s leading site solutions provider
~160,000 modular units of all types
A large fleet of quality mobile offices and portable storage units
The other was inefficient marketing execution and poor customer service. The company had tried to help address this by implementing Salesforce Experience Cloud for their customer service team and front-line field representatives, but adoption of the system was underwhelming. As a result, the sales team continued to capture sales activities on paper, making it difficult to optimize marketing and customer interactions.
The company engaged Apexon to help them address both problems, separately.
Accelerating the delivery of new digital initiatives with confidence
Creating the infrastructure and foundation to scale digital initiatives
Leveraging data and analytics to continuously improve digital delivery processes
Enable digital adoption in a quick, and agile manner
Apexon helped build a customer community portal for the company’s external users.
Build digital infrastructure and foundation for enterprises to scale
Apexon helped the company shift its product development process from Waterfall to Agile. All staff received training on Agile practices so they could deliver incrementally to accelerate progress, learn from their mistakes faster, and gather valuable insights to improve the process.
Leverage data engineering to make strategic decisions and get digital right every time
Poor Productivity – Getting to the Root Cause The company was simply struggling to get work out the door. In 2019, it only completed 3 major projects; a small number given its size. The problem was siloed work structures and a lack of communication across business units. This led to inefficient resource and staff allocation. In addition, a recent merger further aggravated the problem, and created additional friction between departments.
A new approach was required – and it had to take into account both the project management process and the role of IT in addressing the problem.
Poor Customer Service Execution Entirely separate from its productivity problems, the company had invested in over 2,300 Salesforce Service Cloud licenses to support its front line field representatives, but these employees never logged into the system. They had originally intended to use the Salesforce to support sales deals, launch marketing campaigns, and manage customer service. But the majority of the field reps continued to record their activities on paper. Not only were they overspending on unused Salesforce licenses, but customer service issues kept arising from the long paper trail.
The company lacked a streamlined approach for order tracking to keep the front line updated about shipments. As a result, the company was losing vital customer information and inaccurately recording sales histories. The company needed a better way to track customer feedback, signatures, orders, and deliveries.
Apexon began with comprehensive discovery sessions to understand where communication was breaking down and impeding productivity.
The solution was a new IT-led structure focused on communication and transparency. This gave the IT team a much larger voice in evaluating the feasibility and ROI of technology projects and equipping staff with the right tools.
The company shifted its product development process from Waterfall to Agile. All staff received training on Agile practices so they could deliver incrementally to accelerate progress, learn from their mistakes faster, and gather valuable insights to improve the process. Most importantly, the IT department learned how to communicate the status of IT projects to all of the company’s departments, accelerating the flow of information to better align decision making and staffing across the customer care organization.
Some of the key outcomes of the productivity initiative included:
Increased transparency & project efficiency Each department better understands one another’s priorities, enabling them to synch project planning and eliminate redundancy and waste
Easily measured ROI A 400% increase in productivity in less than half the time
Increased cost savings & success rates By increasing transparency and communication, end product is finalized quicker and more efficiently
Apexon’s solution was to build a customer self-service portal for customers and external field reps. This served as a forcing mechanism for the company’s employees by eliminating the paper trail and changing the process of creating, tracking, and updating service appointments into a digitized approach. Users formed “virtual communities” which offered personalized customer care. They were able to share information and weigh in on best approaches and answers to problems – fostering community building around common needs and subject areas.
As a result, the company gained several key benefits:
Big monthly cost savings By converting its 2,300 Salesforce user licenses to Customer Experience Cloud licenses and deflecting contact center traffic
An easy-to-use customer experience portal Similar to popular tracking portals like FedEx and UPS – to drive customer self service
Creation of a virtual community Complete with automated chat bots, support services, and personalized customer care
Improved customer service Immediate assistance for users; a robust knowledge base to disseminate articles on troubleshooting common problems
