"Before Salesforce, we had many disparate systems within the company. None of them worked. With Salesforce, employees in 18 countries share a common CRM solution and our visibility has improved 100 percent. The AppExchange has given us a single place to find a variety of applications to meet our business needs, from recruiting to marketing. The apps we've found are easy to deploy, require little or no training, and offer immediate benefits to users."


- Miyachi Unitek

Miyachi Unitek Taps Salesforce.com Professional Services to Quickly Implement Unified Business Infrastructure

Challenge

  • Miyachi Unitek Corporation, a leading global provider of specialized welding equipment, managed customer information on multiple, disparate systems, making it impossible for global sales teams to access information and coordinate efforts
  • Miyachi executives sought a common system, globally accessible by all business units, so accounts could receive more coordinated attention
  • Miyachi marketing and sales wanted better prospect and customer visibility
  • The company also wanted better lead-tracking capabilities, to improve its ability to determine the ROI of marketing investments
  • Marketing was wasting tremendous amounts of time after each email campaign manually removing bounced email addresses

Solution

  • After considering Microsoft CRM, Siebel On Premise, and SalesLogix, Miyachi selected Salesforce for its global accessibility, fast implementation, and hosted architecture
  • With Salesforce, marketing, sales, customer service, and production share one common solution for better communication, operational efficiency, and customer insights
  • Salesforce.com Professional Services helped Miyachi integrate core back office processes with Salesforce, bidirectionally synchronizing customer information, quotes, orders, invoices, and return materials authorizations (RMAs)
  • Miyachi used Force.com Builder to create custom tabs and objects to integrate Web mail into Salesforce and configure products based on desired features, accelerating productivity
  • The company installed six applications from the AppExchange to improve efficiency and returns on sales, marketing, and recruiting processes
  • Thanks to Force.com Mobile, Salesforce is accessible in the field and around the world via Palm Treos, making it easy for users to be on the road and connected to Salesforce and to move sales opportunities faster through its pipeline to closure

Results

  • Employees in 18 countries benefit from Salesforce's internationalized, on-demand architecture, which gives them streamlined marketing and sales processes
  • Complete visibility throughout the organization has reduced the number of internal calls made to check order status by 70%
  • Production Planning now knows exactly what products need to be built and prioritized at any given time
  • Use of Salesforce now drives the entire business, including the production group, which uses pipeline information to proactively plan manufacturing needs
  • Fewer marketing dollars and time are wasted, and marketing now has deep insights into where to spend lead-generation dollars based on revenue generated from past campaigns
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Case Study

Miyachi Unitek's tagline is "Spirit of Innovation." No surprise then that when the global manufacturing company needed to centralize its business systems it looked beyond traditional on-premises solutions to something different: Salesforce on-demand CRM and the AppExchange from salesforce.com.

Miyachi Unitek is the world leader in equipment and systems for resistance and laser welding, laser marking, hermetic sealing, pulsed heat soldering, bonding and heat sealing, and wirebond pull testing—systems that bond disparate parts to create one, unbreakable unit. But with operations in 18 countries around the world, the Southern California-based company consistently faced business challenges that had a negative impact on productivity, efficiency, and as a result, revenue opportunities. At the heart of these challenges lay an outdated, incongruent business infrastructure.

Miyachi needed a business system that reflected its products—unbreakable and unified: a customer-focused business system that could sustain the company's continuity and competitive advantage.

"We've always tried to approach our business progressively," says Barbara Kuntz, marketing communications manager for Miyachi Unitek, reflecting on the company's subsequent transformation as a salesforce.com customer. "Leveraging one unified system empowers our company to perform more effectively—positioning us as the global leader we are today."

Wanted: One Customer-Focused Business System

It wasn't always so easy. Disjointed legacy systems prevented efficient operations. Outdated sales processes drained productivity. Salespeople nestled in their comfort zones, using various homegrown applications. Sales managers lacked a complete, real-time view into their pipeline. As the company grew, scaling the sales organization to sophisticated global account selling practices became increasingly difficult.

The lack of visibility affected production and resource planning. The company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) program was not integrated with the sales process. As a result, even if the company could establish accurate sales forecasts—which were always a challenge—it would be unable to support just-in-time supply-chain processes or effective inventory management. On the marketing end, Kuntz couldn't validate the effectiveness of lead-generation campaigns.

After considering Microsoft CRM, Siebel On Premise, and SalesLogix, Miyachi Unitek chose salesforce.com's flexible, on-demand solution for managing sales and business operations.

Salesforce.com's powerful Force.com platform, which would enable the company to develop, customize, and integrate on-demand applications, was also a big draw.

Quick Time to Value, Return on Investment with Salesforce.com Professional Services

Miyachi Unitek wanted to deploy Salesforce globally, but the IT department consisted of just one person, and the company had no internal programmers. "We considered using third-party contractors, but no one knows Salesforce like salesforce.com, so we turned to the salesforce.com's Professional Services team," says Kuntz.

Drawing on experience gained from more than 2,400 customer implementations, salesforce.com's Professional Services group successfully aligned Miyachi Unitek's business processes by customizing and integrating applications over a central on-demand system, using Salesforce SFA, Salesforce Marketing, and Salesforce Service & Support. The group also leveraged the Force.com platform to integrate Miyachi Unitek's ERP application with its customer-facing applications and used Force.com Builder to customize new and existing applications. An Outlook Mail tab now integrates Webmail into Salesforce, and a Product Configurator tab allows salespeople to query products based on desired features and functions, speeding quote generation.

The first phase of implementation took just three months. "I think that salesforce.com's Professional Services team saved us close to three months of implementation time," Kuntz says. "We avoided some costly administrative headaches."

Visible Improvements

With the implementation, now rolled out to 18 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, salespeople can instantly access contacts generated by marketing and inside sales and qualify opportunities faster. Marketing is better equipped to validate campaigns, and accurate sales forecasts create more effective anticipation of product demand. One hundred percent visibility enhances supply-chain management, and improved sophistication in resource planning enables the company to maintain lower inventories. Plus, with production schedules aligned with forecasts, order entries and fulfillment are more predictable.

"Our VP of sales attributes Salesforce with enabling us to achieve our sales goals in the last financial year. Visibility into our pipeline allowed him to see which deals were near closing so he could 'book and burn' at the end of each quarter. Salesforce gives us the kind of business insight that no other solution could offer," says Kuntz.

Customization Helps Drive Adoption

Despite initial concerns about adoption, sales, marketing, production, and executives quickly embraced the system. Miyachi Unitek's sales teams around the globe use a custom-designed object within Salesforce SFA to easily enter customer requests for product samples. Because the sales representatives can now track this case status within the Salesforce application, they no longer need to call the applications group for updates, resulting in a 70 percent reduction in calls and saving the company both time and money.

"The ability to easily customize the Salesforce applications for our unique manufacturing industry-specific needs is something that no other solution on the market offered," says Jim Malloy, vice president of sales. "Using Salesforce, we are able to share information across applications and around the globe with no extra work from our IT department. We have gained significant improvements in our operations, with reduced overall cost."

Lasting Benefits—Now and Later

It doesn't stop there. Salesforce.com Professional Services consistently updates Miyachi Unitek's task force on future product enhancements, enabling the company to proactively plan its system's evolution.

"In my experience, few companies share product road-map information with anyone other than their executive-level staff. Salesforce.com, on the other hand, shares this information not only with its employees on every level but also with its customers," Kuntz says. "Salesforce.com's proactive approach to considering the lifespan of its solution—and empowering its customers to do the same—is refreshing. Salesforce.com employees are plugged into what's happening at the company. They know their business—and that's rare."

Miyachi Unitek Corporation

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