Enterprise customer sees benefits in consolidating services under one platform

Chip Reeves of Dow Corning knows it’s hard to satisfy a customer when employees lack easy access to product details, sales histories, reporting tools and all the other information sales representatives need to do their jobs.

But until last September, Dow Corning did not provide its staff of hundreds of salespeople a convenient access point where they could find all the information that’s relevant to customers. To solve that problem, Dow Corning switched from Oracle’s Siebel CRM software to SAP CRM, and integrated sales functions into one interface using the SAP NetWeaver Portal, says Reeves, who is director of marketing and sales process, and oversaw Dow Corning’s implementation of SAP CRM. Now, instead of having to search through various systems to find what they need, Dow Corning salespeople have just one starting point.

“We used the portal to reframe a day in the life of the seller,” Reeves says.

Dow Corning also has been able to improve CRM integration with mobile devices, allowing salespeople to initiate sales processes no matter where they are.

There was nothing inherently wrong with Siebel, Reeves says. But Siebel CRM was the lone Siebel application used by Dow Corning sales agents, who rely heavily on SAP applications.

By consolidating everything under SAP, Dow Corning was able to integrate about 17 internal systems into a single interface, giving sales representatives access to customer and sales history, customer satisfaction reports, pricing information, price-change request forms and detailed product information. It’s all part of a service-oriented architecture giving Dow Corning’s customer-facing business more flexibility.

Dow Corning is a maker of silicon-based technology based in Midland, Mich., with more than 25,000 customers in dozens of industries.

The only new SAP products Dow Corning took on were CRM and Exchange Infrastructure, a component of NetWeaver that integrates enterprise applications.

But the change allowed IT to use several pre-existing SAP products in new ways. Reporting tools from SAP Business Information Warehouse became available to salespeople, eliminating the need to buy an expensive analytics platform, Reeves says. Dow Corning had not purchased Siebel Analytics because it would have forced employees to deal with yet another interface, he says.

Dow Corning was already using NetWeaver Portal as well, but the switch to SAP CRM opened up new possibilities for that software.

“We introduced role-based portals for sellers and sales managers, and we really used the SAP portal to reframe CRM,” Reeves says. “From my perspective, CRM starts with the SAP portal more than it does from SAP CRM.”

Reeves won't say how much Dow Corning spends for SAP applications compared with Siebel. But SAP’s pricing structure, which does not charge per person, has allowed Dow Corning to increase the number of people using CRM by 30% to 40%. This gave many people who are not in sales the ability to access more useful information, he says.

“If you’re paying for a license seat, you have to be really judicious about who you’re adding to the mix,” he notes.