Konica Minolta Sharpens Its Customer Focus with Salesforce CRM

Full Case Study

Konica Minolta is an organisation in motion. Its European head office is located at Langenhagen in Germany. Konica Minolta provides printing solutions for the business market, working closely with its own sales offices and several partners. Products reach end-users via distributors and resellers.  Konica Minolta is a growing organisation with subsidiaries in countries including Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Benelux.

Requirements for a new CRM solution
The previous CRM solution at Konica Minolta no longer met the company's wishes and requirements. It was being used only for service and support but there was a great desire to expand the package to use it for marketing and sales purposes. Konica Minolta: “Our inventory of the requirements which we wanted a new CRM system to meet revealed a number of criteria - among other things we wanted a system that could be developed and implemented quickly. It also had to integrate with ERP.  What's more, we were keen to keep investment costs low, to be able to implement the system in several countries and to burden our IT department as little as possible.”

Konica Minolta strives to become a more service-minded company with service provisioning within sales processes. To achieve this goal, Konica Minolta needed detailed insight into customer data. Using cloud-computing solutions enables Konica Minolta to move towards supplying more solution-driven products and services - it is the most effective way to give the sales process greater added value.

Choosing the right partner: salesforce.com
"It was an intensive effort to find the right partner for a new CRM solution", says Konica Minolta. "We started by looking into the on-premise products of various providers but soon discovered that we preferred the speed and flexibility of a cloud-computing solution. Salesforce.com was clearly the provider best able to support our processes. In July 2006 we implemented Salesforce within our sales department, taking just three months to complete. The definitive version has been running since October 2006 and we are now able to monitor sales processes continuously and have improved them significantly. We noticed that we preferably also wanted support within our servicing and support department. Within just one year salesforce.com was additionally able to deliver this for us in the form of Salesforce Call Centre, so in that respect too we have found a fully-fledged partner."
In Europe Konica Minolta uses the Salesforce CRM Sales product to support its sales, marketing and servicing departments. Konica Minolta has also implemented Force.com's sandbox, a test environment for testing new features and customisations that do not make any demands on the capacity of the production CRM system. Separating the test area from the CRM system avoids potential problems capable of disrupting the business process, enabling Konica Minolta to innovate quickly and efficiently. Konica Minolta uses premier support from salesforce.com, which means remote support of the very highest service level. Additionally, Konica Minolta uses salesforce.com’s partner relationship management solution, Salesforce CRM Partners, to support the indirect channel.

"We chose salesforce.com for numerous reasons. The most important one was that it took only a short time to implement the CRM system. Moreover, the initial investment costs for the system are low”, says Konica Minolta. “All the IT activities necessary to manage the system are carried out by salesforce.com without us having to get involved. There is no burden at all on our own IT department. Through our cooperation with salesforce.com we have in effect gained a complete servicing organisation."

As with all large enterprises, Konica Minolta deploy a variety of software packages and one of the deciding factors to engage with salesforce.com was the possibility to seamlessly integrate with all software currently in use. In due course Konica Minolta wants a complete solution that integrates all its software across Europe.

Commenting on the benefits of the multitenant model provided by Salesforce CRM which allows companies to receive regular automatic product upgrades with no disruption to the business, Konica Minolta said "Our experience is that salesforce.com issues new versions a number of times each year. We naturally manage our own processes within our sales department.  The IT department of salesforce.com is not involved in this matter. We don't seek the assistance of a partner unless it starts to become technical."

Business benefits after implementation
As Konica Minolta has partnered with Salesforce CRM, the company possesses a CRM solution that can grow in step with its business. Compared with the previous system, there are far greater possibilities for combining information, so there are also greater reporting capabilities. What's more, Konica Minolta employees now have round-the-clock access via the Internet to complete customer information.

"Sometimes we need specific solutions for an issue within our CRM application", says Konica Minolta. "When this occurs we frequently use salesforce.com's partners.  Salesforce.com has built up an enormous partner network over the years so the solution is never far away. Salesforce.com likes brainstorming with us and puts forward suggestions regarding partners." For example, Konica Minolta is keen to learn more about the ins and outs of interconnecting its ERP system with other applications. "For advice on this matter we enlist the help of salesforce.com partners." AppExchange has become an important source for Konica Minolta as they use various applications easily deployed with just a few clicks, including Advanced Professional e-marketing and the Advanced Management Data Tool.

"As integration is one of the unique advantages of Salesforce, we are eager to see what other developments might also be possible in the future. We are thinking, for example, of managing invoicing by means of a salesforce.com application", says Konica Minolta. "For the time being we will continue monitoring the deployment of the current project together with the customer success managers of salesforce.com. Konica Minolta and salesforce.com attach utmost importance to achieving a high degree of acceptance by users – after all, they are the people who use the new system, which makes them the project's key success factor."

Konica Minolta