Case Study: CAREL INDUSTRIES S.p.A.

The Company

CAREL Group was founded in 1973 in Brugine (PD) and now it is a world leader in control solutions for air-conditioning, refrigeration and heating, and systems for humidification and evaporative cooling.

CAREL Group is present all over the world with its 20 branches and 9 production plants. 80% of its revenue comes from foreign markets and about 30% of it comes from outside the EMEA area (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

The Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) are the main customer category of the Group, followed by distributors, contractors and installers.

CAREL’s needs

CAREL started using vtenext CRM On Premise in 2013. Few years later, in 2017 the Group decided to switch to a Cloud solution in order to extend the use of the platform to all the branches and production plants with the goal to support the ambitious business expansion strategy.

The markets in which CAREL works are various and with different development levels: from the mature Italian market where the company has an historical presence, to international ones where the company is growing and attempting to conquer new market shares.

For this reason CAREL had the necessity to introduce a flexible, safe and scalable solution capable of quickly adapting to the company needs, optimizing at the same time the ROI of the investment.

Cloud, multi-organization and sales processes: the winning solution

CAREL chose vtenext CRM in Cloud because of its high flexibility and the wide possibilities of integration and customizations. Thanks to the support “on the field” provided by the partner it was possible to translate into a concrete project the company specific needs.

The choice of implementing a Cloud solution was the key to encourage the access and the share of information with the sales force spread all over the word in addition to granting high usability standards, like for example the speed and stability of the platform itself.

Up to now the solution allows the breakdown of final customers by type of market, channel of distribution and sales office. Not a small segmentation considering the dimension of the Group and its worldwide presence.

The implementation started from the standard modules (accounts, calendar events and contacts) to be then integrated with specific processes and features that help the sales staff to prioritize their tasks and to focus on activities designed to reach the commercial goals.

To date CAREL’s branches can be managed in the CRM thanks to the “Multi-Organization” feature, only the Brugine Headquarter has the “permissions” to access the data managed by each branch.

Thanks to this feature and to the creation of different users, having specific write and read permissions, the Group was able to manage efficiently the communication with the branches and to implement the company processes and procedures.

In the meantime all the peculiarity of each branch are preserved: from the language of vtenext and the local currency to the ability of the branch manager to differentiate the permission accesses of the users of the local team.

On the sales processes side it was possible to implement a lead management process: the goal was to manage as quickly as possible the new leads, speeding up the qualification and first contact steps. Though ad hoc reports the branch manager verifies the lead status and steps in if the process stops or slows down. The aim is to constantly monitor the processing time, setting time windows and, in the event of deviations, understand the causes and improve the process.

Another successful process is the one regarding the sales offers. Each member of the sales team has a different autonomy of setting the price of the offer, higher is the position in the organization higher will be the autonomy. The goal of this process is to successfully manage these decisions, within the Group and the various branches, coordinating and keeping track of it. In fact, thanks to an automated workflow, the manager receives a notification regarding the offer and its price (if it is out of the autonomy of the users that created it) and, with just a click, he or she can decide whether to approve it or not.

In conclusion to CAREL vtenext is not a “closed box”, the integration with the various ERPs in use in the different branches is certainly a point of strength to continue spreading the CRM logic. Thanks to its higher flexibility and Open Source nature vtenext easily adapts to the company infrastructure allowing a scalability.

vtenext implementation..

Implementing a CRM solution in a complex organization it is not always easy.

Besides the difficulties strictly related to the implementation process another challenge is linked to the internal resistance to change, in the CAREL Group, this was found in some users that were more used to unstructured and informal work procedures and saw the CRM as “invasive”.

CAREL successfully managed this transaction phase with training sessions though which all the professional involved understood the added value coming from the adoption of a CRM solution and approach.

.. and benefits

Here below some benefits:

•     Increase in the number of active users: from 230 in 2017 to about 400 in 2020
•     Scalability, the CRM is used by all the branches even having different ERPs in use
•     Adaptability to the company infrastructure and to the different systems is use by the various branches of CAREL
•     Better management and control of the sales process
•     Simplification of everyday tasks like for instance the use of standard template for offers and quotes
•     Higher efficiency in the management of the hand over procedure
•     Improved communication among branches
•     Share of customers information and data