REFERENCE STORY
Overlack Group
Collaboration of many locations optimized
The Overlack Group renewed the management of customer and supplier data as well as the integration of CRM, SAP and email with GEDYS IntraWare.
The Overlack Group deals with the chemical distribution of basic and specialty chemicals and is an internationally operating family-owned company with 245 employees with headquarters in Mönchengladbach. Overlack sells around 12,000 products in 17 countries. The Overlack Group has been using SAP ERP ECC 6.0 since 2012. Special challenges for the company are the cooperation of many locations in several countries, the high number of different products as well as information distributed across different systems.
“We have achieved holistic integration of our applications with GEDYS IntraWare, even email and SAP. Many people don’t realize how much time is actually spent finding and opening SAP transactions until you get to the record you want. Especially in sales, many requests for orders and quotations arrive every day and need to be processed.
Our colleagues save 80% of the time previously required for processing and reporting back to the customer. Often a lot of time is spent searching for optimization possibilities. But the fact that such a small tool brings such effects so quickly, surprised us very much. We will also use BusinessMail4SAP® in other areas of the company.”
Thomas Janssen, IT Manager at the Overlack Group
A project with many requirements
With the aim of simplifying the personal organization of employees, Overlack decided to renew its historically grown and outdated solutions for the management of addresses as well as the reporting system.
- A lot of data should be deployed across sites, others only for specific sites
- Sales management should be optimised for the individual locations, taking into account the country-specific specificities
- Management should have a quick overview of business-relevant key figures at a higher level
- In order to facilitate cooperation and create transparency, documentation of all communication with customers and suppliers should be ensured in a single application: emails, telephone notes, visit reports, logs and all Correspondence should be easy and fast to record
- Complaint management should be integrated directly into the application to create a connection between sales and service
- The data should be available both online and offline
- The integration of CRM and SAP system should be realized in order to avoid duplication of data maintenance and to maintain a uniform status in both systems
The solution for the Overlack Group
Overlack chose the CRM software from GEDYS IntraWare because it already covered all essential requirements in the standard.
Notes was used as a groupware platform and GEDYS IntraWare CRM was implemented for around 200 users in German, English and Polish. Since then, all employees have had centralized access to the customer and supplier files required for their work, as well as reporting. This provides customized forms for capturing company-specific reports. The corresponding access rights regulate a granular role and authorization concept as well as several databases for addresses and documents.
Integration of CRM, SAP and E-Mail
Email-centric work makes it easier for individual employees to work together: incoming and outgoing emails are automatically assigned to the respective customers and documented in the CRM system. When an email is received, the system immediately provides the corresponding customer file and the most recent operations.
Appointments and tasks from the mail database are assigned directly to the addresses in the CRM system through automatic synchronization. This creates new transparency: the customer file shows the history of all appointments and the current status of the respective task.
The connection between SAP and the CRM system was realized with GEDYS IntraWare Pump, with the aim of avoiding redundant data maintenance. SAP is the leading system. Via interfaces, master data and partner roles from SAP are transferred to CRM, so that all users have up-to-date data in the CRM system at all times.
In use: BusinessMail4SAP®
In addition to connecting the CRM and SAP systems, the most recent task was to create a direct connection between the SAP and the email client. As with all companies today, Overlack communicates mostly by email. Sales employees spend many hours every day processing email requests for orders or quotations. To do this, they access the corresponding SAP transactions. Until now, there was no solution to remove the separation between the SAP and email systems and to gain direct access from the mailbox to the relevant SAP data.
With BusinessMail4SAP, GEDYS IntraWare developed this innovative solution®. BusinessMail4SAP® is installed as an add on in the user’s mailbox. When an email is received, the recipient can immediately see master and transaction data, such as orders or quotes, from the SAP and jump into the corresponding transaction with one click. Advantage: it saves up to five work steps on every request. If you add this to the 200 employees and the approximately 10 requests per employee per day, this means an immense time saving.
Overlack’s IT and sales were immediately convinced: BusinessMail4SAP® is characterized by the simplicity of its implementation, as well as the user-friendly presentation of the interface and the quick jump to SAP, where all relevant data is available. BusinessMail4SAP® was installed for around 200 users within a very short time. BusinessMail4SAP® is available for MS Outlook and IBM Notes. It provides access to all SAP transactions such as addresses, orders, orders, packing slips, invoices, communication data, bank statements or returns.