PECO Europe

A Microsoft CRM Case Study

 

The Challenge

PECO Europe work in a wide range of industries throughout Europe and the Middle East. PECO Europe has two divisions specialising in different market sectors.

PECO Food and Beverage are suppliers of specialist equipment to food and beverage producers. This includes supplying package inspection and liquid nitrogen dosing systems to market leading companies.

PECO Cryogenics specialise in the supply of fully vacuum insulated, frost free liquid nitrogen piping systems, hoses and accessories. PECO Europe's Gary Allcock explains more about the company.

"PECO began with the original aim to bring quality and innovative equipment into the marketplace. Our business has further diversified to enable us to continue to serve our growing customer base above their expectation."

PECO wanted an account-centered application with the ability to track and manage the installations of their products. It had to be an application capable of capturing data from a previous ACT! 6.0 system.

PECO wanted to streamline its sales process with an application that was fully integrated with their email client Microsoft Outlook. Although data migration was important, the overriding demand was a system that would provide powerful contact management abilities and one that would simplify sales procedures.

"We are always looking at ways to drive efficiency and profitability while still providing excellent customer service. What we needed was a system that would provide increased sales force and marketing automation with an ability for the tracking of customer contacts, whilst still providing a user-friendly interface for our staff," explains Gary.

PECO also wanted to use revenue forecasting from their business opportunities, activity tracking and be able to send their quotes as PDF attachments via email. Of any CRM solution Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 provided the most versatile to meet its needs.

Solution

Dynamics CRM was the ideal solution. Its out-of-the-box functionality provided the powerful contact management sytem that was required by PECO. This was also combined with the ease of integrating third party addons that would meet the specific abilities that PECO required.

As PECO was using a peer-to-peer network the decision was made to upgrade to Microsoft Small Business Server Premium. This not only allowed Dynamics CRM to be installed but provided PECO with an ISA firewall, Microsoft Sequal Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and push email.

Dynamics CRM provided the solution for the account centric system that PECO needed. With customisable fields, a powerful advanced find feature and the ability to create relationships between accounts, contacts and projects, Dynamics CRM could provide a powerful contact management system. Using a customer relationship management tool, as opposed to a contact management tool, PECO could also utilise many more features that Dynamics CRM provides.

Other options for PECO would have been to upgrade their current contact management system, ACT!, however the advanced customer relationship management features that Dynamics CRM contains, provided positive reasons for a need to change.

Excitation was in a strong position to help PECO with its implementation of Dynamics CRM. With a wealth of experience in Microsoft CRM installations and more Microsoft Certified Dynamics CRM technicians that any other company in the UK, PECO could be sure their implementation would run smoothly.

"We are happy we chose Excitation. Their staff were both knowledgeable and personable when it came to implementing Dynamics CRM. They made sure that we had all the resources to make certain Dynamics CRM worked for us as a long term solution and that all our staff were fully prepared to begin working with it,", explains Gary.

Benefits

Distributed / Remote Working: PECO was able to benefit from Dynamics CRM's ability to work remotely. As Dynamics CRM has the ability to work offline in much the same way as Outlook does, it allowed employees to gain the benefits of Microsoft CRM whilst they are out of the office. The Dynamics CRM laptop client allows employees of PECO to access all the Dynamics CRM data even when they are not connected to the network holding it.

Increased Efficiency of Sales Pipeline: Dynamics CRM was able to increase the efficiency of their sales pipeline. It allowed PECO to centrally manage all aspects of a service request, from logging and dispatching to tracking and follow-up. It allows them to view and manage their customer accounts including any customer history. It also created sales tasks through the calendar and has the ability schedule communications with customers.

"One way in which we were able to streamline our sales process is by changing the way we deliver quotes. We were using Microsoft Outlook to send predefined quotes to customers as PDF files. A requirement of the CRM implementation was to streamline this process using the Dynamics CRM interface, whilst maintaining the current flexibility we had. Coupled with a PDF generator, the WordMailMerge add-in provided us with this functionality", Gary Alcock

Better Customer Service: One of the main reasons any company chooses Dynamics CRM is that it provides increased customer service abilities. Dynamics CRM helps improve customer services by increasing the accuracy and efficiency in which you use your data. By having a powerful tool to manage their contacts PECO could also benefit from this. Accounts, leads and opportunities can all be easily tracked. Customer service employees can easily view, share, and update real time information, ensuring a proficient customer service system.

Looking Forward: PECO is currently looking forward to the multicurrency features that Dynamics CRM will provide. The next realease of Dynamics CRM will allow global capabilities. With PECO attracting customers from around the world they are looking forward to working with a product that is developing alongside its companies ambitions.