Manufacturing and Sales with Dynamics 365
Summary
German Lashing uses Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics CRM in their product development, project management and sales activities. Axtrion analyzed the business processes at German Lashing and optimized and configured these cloud platforms to facilitate and enhance the processes. With the consistent use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the sales process, the generation of quotes was significantly simplified and accelerated. Most of all, the locations around the globe were connected and integrated, so that the processes have also been harmonised and optimised for the remote offices.
Office 365
Dynamics 365 - Sales
Dynamics 365 - Business Central
Field of Business
The German Lashing Robert Böck GmbH is an international company headquartered in Bremen. As one of the world’s leading suppliers in container stowage and lashing systems German Lashing designs, manufactures, sells and services complete solutions for the container handling industry.
Due to increasing technologisation the demands on their products are also increasing. Therefore, German Lashing is constantly striving to optimise their fastening systems through further development and advancement to ensure the high quality of their products.
Motivation
German Lashing’s global network includes production plants, branch offices and warehouses. The communication between the locations generated huge amounts of data. It became increasingly necessary to consolidate the vast flood of information through centralisation and homogenisation of IT systems and project data. Especially relevant became the processing of centrally held, product-specific data with collaborative access from the development and production locations.
There was an urgent need for improvement in proposal management, which was carried out of the offices in Germany and China. It became increasingly evident that the documentation of customer communication, quote generation, management of orders and invoices should be harmonized. Consequently a system was required to achieve more efficient sales process with all the stakeholders having controlled and role-based access.
Project Realisation
In order to consolidate the IT infrastructure at German Lashing Axtrion introduced Microsoft Office 365 with SharePoint Online. SharePoint Online was used for central management of product-specific documents. Due to this redundancies were avoided as SharePoint keeps documents constantly up-to-date and ensures high availability for all locations.
To support the sales processes at German Lashing, Axtrion configured the cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM. After the transfer of contact data, product catalogs and price lists in Microsoft Dynamics CRM the quotation management could be centralized and quote generation could be partially automated. Automation scaled the process from simple article compilation up to the signed paper document. As a result there was a significant increase in efficiency of the sales process.
In future Microsoft Dynamics CRM can take over further tasks in the overall sales process as well as in the service area. Automated delivery notes and invoice generation, mapping of current inventory or case management of service requests can be done easily and efficiently using Dynamics CRM. Axtrion will conduct the extension of the system to other areas of the company in close cooperation with German Lashing.
Benefits
The introduction of Microsoft cloud platforms Office 365 and Dynamics CRM for German Lashing resulted in harmonisation of business processes in product development and distribution. Furthermore, it led to consolidation of the IT infrastructure, whereby the IT operating costs could also be lowered. Moreover, the central data storage increased the transparency of the project business and promoted the collaboration among the sites.
Hence, the following benefits are achieved by German lashing:
- Increased efficiency in product development and sales process by optimizing processes and technologies
- Corporate Identity by homogeneous processes and IT infrastructure
- Location independent access to centralised company data from anywhere
- Collaboration on product documents across corporate boundaries
- Complete disaster recovery in the cloud
- 99.99% availability of applications and data
- Significant savings of IT costs (No maintenance and administrative costs)
