Millipore (India) is an Indian subsidiary of the Massachusetts-based Millipore, which provides tools and services for bioscience research and biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The company has 31 locations and 7 manufacturing facilities globally. The main challenge that Millipores sales staff faced was of managing and processing the growing amount of customer data efficiently. The company was using a CRM system that was not providing the efficiency it expected in the dynamic environment, where the availability of real-time data was becoming important. Most of the information was handled manually. This resulted in loss of business opportunities due to the lack of follow up on leads.

This became a greater challenge considering that the companys business was growing and the volume was increasing. The company quickly realized that it was not able to catch all the data it needs to capture due to lack of availability of the right tools.

This led the company management to look for a solution that will help manage its portfolio in a better manner. After evaluating several available solutions, it chose to go for Software as a Service (SaaS), as it felt that all it needed to access the company data was through an Internet access. The company even gave out data cards to its sales-force to ensure it was able to access and update the data more regularly than before.

According to A Sharath Chandra Prasad, executive GM, F&A, Millipore India, The single most important thing in the SaaS implementation is the empowerment of the sales force. They are now able to generate leads quickly. This has also allowed a better reporting mechanism to be put in place. The best part, according to Prasad, is that company management can track leads and take actions when required. Above all, the data on leads about customers, or the prospective customers were accessible to the senior management. This helped Millipore forecast their manufacturing activities. Millipore also added the sales and services component of the solution to manage customer complaints.

Salesforce.com, a leading player in the on-demand business services, implemented Salesforce Enterprise Edition along with the Product Master at Millipore in April 2007 to enhance customer relationship. The implementation was completed in nine weeks. The solution was also integrated with the ERP system in place. The other highlight of the Salesforce.com solution was the capability of getting it deployed across multiple departments and divisions.

Support for multiple divisions and processes, workflow automation, product line forecasting, revenue allocation, and much more, Enterprise Edition is designed to flexibly support all the complexities that are realities of many large companies. The other benefit of the solution to Millipore was that it did not require any specialized training to use the application. Based on the training it got from Salesforce.com, it has created its own training team to initiate the new users into the system. The application also allows creation of custom tabs and renaming of the existing.

And IT teams can use industry-standard tools to easily customize and extend Salesforce.com or even to build and deliver new applications with all the benefits of the on-demand modelTying It All Together. It also allows its customers to write their own integration processes using standard XML and SOAP interfaces.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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