Hitachi Capital UK Goes Live on Salesforce CRM in only Four Weeks with Expert Guidance from salesforce.com Professional Services    

Challenge

• A member of the Hitachi group of companies, Hitachi Capital (UK) plc provides finance for 330,000 consumers, looks after 47,000 fleet vehicles, and provides specialist asset finance and block discounting for a further 5,500 companies
• With finance solutions spanning vehicle, retail, and aviation finance, through to consumer finance and insurance, Hitachi Capital needed a shared, intelligent view across all its lines of business
•  Historically, each division had operated autonomously relying on individual sales management systems such as Goldmine and Access to manage business and consumer relationships.  It was a challenge to share valuable sales information, report horizontally across the business, and manage a unified business operation
• The system used by Vehicle Solutions (supplying, funding and managing company vehicles) was especially vulnerable and in need of updating; this meant the new CRM system needed to be deployed in the shortest possible time

Solution

• Hitachi Capital partnered with salesforce.com Professional Services to roll-out Salesforce CRM SFA to 70 field sales professionals and create a complete, fully customizable 'cloud'-based CRM system 
• Salesforce CRM SFA is being used to deliver one shared source of data covering all its lines of business― there’s no hardware, software or people to worry about, it’s billable based on usage, and Web 2.0-style user interfaces makes it easy to use 
• Each sales professional now has online and offline access to comprehensive activity management; opportunity management, forecasting, reporting; and powerful, real-time analytics and customizable dashboards 
• Salesforce.com Professional Services has been instrumental in supporting the structured, iterative roll-out to the initial Vehicle Solutions division, followed by the other lines of business.  The experienced, professional team organized a one-day planning session involving all stakeholders, followed by a five-day workshop to develop best practice CRM processes
• To streamline the deployment of Salesforce CRM in the Consumer Finance division, salesforce.com Professional Services developed a Java-based data loader solution to export data from the multiple back-end systems into Salesforce CRM.  This data loader solution ensured the sales teams had an up to the minute view of critical data, like account changes and interest rate movements.  The data loader service has subsequently been used to migrate data from Hitachi Capital’s back-end systems to other divisions
  
   

Results

• Thanks to the guidance and hands-on expertise of salesforce.com Professional Services, Hitachi Capital was able to go live on Salesforce CRM in only four weeks of starting the project
• Live for three years, Hitachi Capital has experienced a significant increase in business activity using Salesforce CRM  
• Salesforce CRM has been instrumental in providing Hitachi Capital with the cross-business transparency needed to cross-sell and up-sell complementary financial services to businesses and consumers  
• Sales productivity among the field sales teams has risen dramatically since they began using Salesforce CRM
• Beyond simply deploying the cloud-based CRM system, salesforce.com Professional Services displayed an intense understanding of Hitachi Capital’s business and shared their desire to see the project rolled out quickly and effectively 
• Based on this success, Hitachi Capital is now considering using the data loader solution to provide its partners with restricted access to Salesforce CRM―sharing data on partner deals, margins, and other activities