Analog Devices Integrates Salesforce CRM with SAP

On-Demand CRM Platform Grows to Serve 800 Sales and Marketing Professionals

With more than 40 product lines, a mature set of enterprise information systems, and a highly trained sales team operating on five continents, Analog Devices needed a CRM system that could easily be meshed with its existing business strategy-and be quickly embraced by a broad base of users. As a leading manufacturer of integrated circuits for analog- and digital-signal-processing applications, the Norwood, Massachusetts-based company lives and breathes technology. Thus it's no surprise that corporate officers have high expectations for the software they choose to deploy.

When it came to CRM software, no vendor could match the power and efficiency of the cloud-computing solution from salesforce.com.

Since implementing Salesforce CRM Sales, Analog Devices has witnessed continuously improving efficiencies across its product lines and geographies. The global deployment, completed in just 90 days, incorporates customer and product data from SAP R/3 applications into the Salesforce CRM environment to provide crucial information pertaining to each opportunity, such as direct access to the company's 30,000-item catalog.

Salesforce.com Provides Winning Solution

Like thousands of other companies before it, Analog Devices was captivated by salesforce.com's cloud-computing model, which minimizes up-front costs and simplifies implementation chores by delivering enterprise-caliber CRM software as a low-impact Web service. Customers can deploy the complete suite of Salesforce CRM capabilities quickly and easily, and they can add extra software capabilities directly to Salesforce CRM via the Force.com platform.

After a detailed evaluation, Analog determined that Salesforce CRM was the easiest CRM software to customize and offered the best user experience in the industry. Salesforce.com outperformed competing CRM vendors in a "day-in-the-life" CRM scenario, which included salespeople, field applications engineers, sales managers, and product line marketing. According to Cheryl O'Connor, worldwide CRM strategy manager at Analog Devices, Analog found it easy to customize Salesforce CRM to match existing roles, processes, and workflow requirements.

Since then, these capabilities have driven user adoption and facilitated employee collaboration worldwide. "With global functionality and offline access to our product catalog, Salesforce CRM is a terrific choice for CRM success, delivering increased visibility into our sales pipeline and enabling us to better understand our business," says O'Connor.

Focused Expertise Accelerates Implementation Cycle

One of Analog Devices' key requirements was to roll out the Salesforce CRM solution to its global sales force quickly and effectively. To prevent any missteps, the company decided to enlist the Salesforce.com Consulting team.

"Salesforce.com demonstrated itself as a trusted partner committed to our success during the sales cycle, so it was obvious to us that we should continue that relationship through the implementation," says Richard Feist, Analog Devices' IT manager for field sales applications.

Salesforce.com Consulting offers a proven methodology-refined over the course of over 3,000 customer implementations-that spans discovery and planning, project management, data migration, integration expertise, and solution deployment. Because every implementation is unique, the methodology and approach are tailored to each individual client.

To kick off the project and solidify the requirements, salesforce.com spearheaded a two-day business process review. During this meeting, project stakeholders laid out their vision for the new CRM solution and then agreed on key business processes and deliverables. "We were very impressed with what was accomplished during the business process review," says O'Connor. "The salesforce.com consultant really kept us on track and helped us achieve an aligned strategy at least three months earlier than if we had done it ourselves."

Direct Integration with SAP

Thanks to the careful planning and business outcome focus of Salesforce.com Consulting, Analog Devices deployed a customized, tailored solution to 700 users worldwide in just three months-Analog subsequently has grown the user base to 800. Part of the challenge involved integrating account and product master data from Analog Devices' SAP system, which serves as the master source of customer and product data for the company. Analog Devices wanted to make this data available in Salesforce CRM to simplify the process of creating and tracking new sales opportunities while eliminating duplicate data entry.

The Salesforce CRM integration capabilities were critically important during this phase of the project. Working with salesforce.com's seasoned consultants, Analog Devices successfully integrated Salesforce CRM with its existing SAP system.

To implement this software infrastructure, Analog Devices worked with five technologies: Salesforce CRM, the Force.com Web services API, WebMethods for EAI, SAP, and the Tivoli Maestro package for job scheduling. (Analog selected the WebMethods product because it was already used internally for other integration projects.)

The result was a best-of-breed CRM solution that delivers valuable account and product data to a worldwide sales team. Thanks to the industry-standard Web services interface of Force.com, Analog Devices was able to use its existing integration platform and skill sets to quickly complete the project. "The implementation was definitely a success," says Feist. "With the help of salesforce.com's implementation expertise and business outcome focus, we shortened our time to market for the solution by three months."

Global Rollout, Local Support

Salesforce.com's expertise in global cloud-computing deployment was essential to rolling out the software in Taiwan, Japan, China, and other parts of Asia, as well as in North and South America, the Middle East, and Europe. Today these users can independently select from 11 available languages.

To provide optimal support to these users, Analog Devices signed up for Salesforce.com Premier Support, which included a priority phone queue, 24/7 live phone support, and weekly phone calls. The service featured an assigned salesforce.com customer service representative (CSR) who was well versed in Analog Devices' specific implementation. "We were impressed when we saw the CSR taking the time to really understand our business objectives so that all of our discussions and requests had context," notes O'Connor.

The assigned CSR helped Analog Devices discover innovative solutions to any issues and communicates tips, tricks, and best practices, which increases end user productivity by hundreds of hours per year. The CSR also took part in weekly status calls with the Analog Devices team and conducts "health checks" to review Analog's overall business processes, evaluated how Salesforce CRM is being used, and made recommendations and adjustments as necessary. "The CSR knew more about the product and helped us get actionable solutions faster," explains Feist. "Until we were ready to run Salesforce CRM on our own, the CSR completed our CRM team."

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