ERP CHALLENGE- HOW WE MAKE SALES FASTER

project overview

During a digital transformation project for our client and the development of service architecture for their systems, we came across an opportunity to boost their sales processes. We came across a very interesting opportunity to increase the total cash turnover of the client’s business by increasing the automation of the sales department.

The employees estimated that they spend up to 30% of their time processing complex operations in ERP and CRM systems which existed separately. This made the sales team perform large amounts of busy work by filling out a variety of forms every day.

With this, we decided to develop and create an MVP product or “Sales Management Center”. This was a single WEB platform that combined all the necessary business processes of the company into one place through its integrations. This made the sales team’s process easier and simpler to use. 

Project details

The main product we created was designed because the sales team needed to close contracts with users. The problem was that their current system was complex and repetitive for all sales staff- thus, this- became our main focus for the digital transformation of the company. 

To isolate the issues, we tried to identify the main difficulties from the point of view of the user through in-depth interviews with a focus group (in this case, the sales team, of which there are more than 200 people in the company), and after the interviews, we identified several key areas of concern:

• Several independent systems (CRM\ERP) were involved in the same business process chain. So the client had to work with different applications, and there was no way to get end-to-end analytics

• The client had a constantly growing number of sales staff and their assistants, who were working mainly on routine operations, which could have been easily automated. At the same time, it took months to train everyone to work because of the complexity of the systems.

• The speed of working with the system itself was very low due to many different forms and waiting for the execution of operations in them.

Certainly, it seems that the feedback above would already be sufficient to start the project, but we decided to test it technologically: for the selected focus group, with their approval, we installed special software to automatically track time and track transitions between different screen forms within the company systems.

To our surprise, we found that the users of our selected focus groups spend about 30% of their time working in the systems in question, and all the rest of the time is spent working in Outlook with e-mail and messaging inside the company.

This was another signal to us that it is necessary to review these interactions and try to understand if there was potential for automation and structuring of business processes.

As a result of the simple analysis through interviews, it became clear to us that moving some processes from the mail to our new product becomes an important stage for the MVP. With an opportunity to offer the sales team a unique system, they had never had before:

A system that implemented a sales process in one single system, with a few clicks and a couple of screens, instead of in three systems. 

This was the foundation of our digital transformation, whose development and implementation from scratch we completed after hiring a team consisting of:

challenges

• The main challenge we faced in this project was the need to dive into the deepest level of understanding of the processes of a large IT distributor- as well as describing all the possible scenarios nuances and being able to define the digital transformation scope. At the start of the project, it seemed that the processes were solid and essential, which meant we had to repeat the complexity of the ERP system implementation. This had been slowly developing for a decade and was extremely complex (something we wanted to end).
• From the technological aspect – we faced the limits of ERP itself, which was technologically unable to process a large flow of linked operations asynchronously, and thus quickly return answers on the results of the operations. Therefore some processes, such as, for example, putting goods into the reserve, could take minutes and be executed with an error.
• And the third challenge was a new approach to working with the customer, where, in fact, we did a start-up project inside the company under our leadership, hiring a complete product team from outside and leading it as a Product Owner.

Proposed technical improvements

• NET (.NET6, AspNetCore)
• React / Redux / TypeScript / Webpack
• Integration Services
• Redis
• PostgreSQL
• Keycloak
• RabbitMQ
• DevOps (k8s, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Harbor, Vault)

Project results

• Hired a team of 10 people

• Launched a Scrum product development process with two-week sprints, rapid hypothesis testing, and collecting regular user feedback

• Developed a design system, UI Kit – which became the foundation for all the company’s new internal platforms with engineering design

• In the course of MVP implementation, we made a small pivot, analogous to the most used report in ERP related to product availability and search, but 30 times faster (caching technology is not available in ERP) and with a well-engineered UI (search response time 1.5 seconds VS 30-40 seconds in ERP)

• MVP delivery time was delayed by two months, but after its implementation, all the employees of the sales department began to use the system, and the product was approved by the users and got further financing from our client