Advantech accelerates its mission to enable an intelligent planet

Advantech is one of Taiwan’s biggest global brands. The business is a global leader in intelligent systems and embedded platforms and is on a mission to enable an intelligent planet.

Increased efficiency of sales and a 50% reduction in IT cycle time set Advantech up for future growth and innovation.

With manufacturing plants and logistics centres across the globe and offices in over 30 countries, Advantech grappled with challenges common to large organisations operating across different geographies and timezones.

Data silos impacted transparency and efficiency of communication across regions and teams. Manual workload impacted the efficiency of sales and processes like quoting and channel management.

The business established a digital marketing department which set out on a digital transformation journey to address these challenges. Advantech had outgrown its previous platform, and the team decided that to increase business pace and innovation, it had to replace its CRM. Recognising that Salesforce’s cloud-based platform and regular release of new features aligned well with the business’s strategic plans, Advantech selected Salesforce for its transformation.

At Advantech, Sales and Marketing teams are united onto one platform, helping to break down data silos and improve collaboration. Sales Cloud now provides Advantech with a more flexible CRM, helping it cater to the needs of sales teams in different regions and increasing their productivity. For example, Sales Cloud has reduced time spent on tasks such as searching for contacts and creating new opportunities within the CRM by up to 93%.

Sales Cloud dashboards additionally provide sales managers with instant insights into team performance, allowing them to quickly step in and provide any necessary support.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement aligns sales and marketing teams around a single source of truth and helps them collaboratively execute strategies and campaigns. By working in sync, they can respond faster to new opportunities and accelerate conversion. Sales teams also have better visibility into leads, including where they’ve come from, what they’re interested in, and their level of maturity.

Since using Marketing Cloud, the business has also seen email delivery rates for campaigns increase to over 99%. Email open rates are also up, averaging more than 25%.

CPQ from Revenue Cloud simplifies quoting for Advantech’s sales team. The business sells more than 30,000 products—each with its own pricing strategy—and CPQ helps the sales team to accurately and efficiently create quotes for all. In fact, with pricing automatically inserted into quotes, most of those using CPQ can complete quotes for standard products within 10 minutes and complete more complex quotes for configurable products within 15 minutes.

CPQ also streamlines the approval of discounts, so the business can empower sales reps to offer discounts while controlling profitability.

Salesforce Professional Services supported the deployment of CPQ, tailoring it towards the business’s needs and enabling it to calculate pricing based on a range of factors.

The Professional Services team is one of several partners who’ve supported Advantech’s transformation and helped the business maximise the value of Salesforce. Partners have included eCloudvalley, FITi, OSF Digital, Eleven Digital, DTC Technology, ENOSIX, Persistent, Slalom, and Trifecta—each of which has provided specific product or regional expertise.

Advantech relies on channel partners to provide global coverage. Salesforce Partner Relationship Management, together with DocuSign from the AppExchange, streamlines partner onboarding and contract renewals.

In the first month of deployment alone, 500 contracts were sent and signed via DocuSign—eliminating what would have been a significant manual effort.

Partner Relationship Management also underpins a portal where partners can place batch orders and register upcoming projects and projected sales. This helps Advantech better forecast revenues and manage its supply chain to meet customer demand.

Soon, certified channel partners will also be able to access Advantech’s marketing materials through the portal, while Advantech will be able to access more information about downstream customers and better manage its channels and rebate programs.

Advantech is in the midst of replacing its on-premise ecommerce solution with Commerce Cloud. Its first estore on the platform‌ — ‌IoT Market Express‌ — ‌allows customers worldwide to order products that ship from the business’s warehouse in Taiwan.

The business plans to launch additional estores in the US and Europe which will allow customers to order products requiring configuration. Advantech also plans to adopt a headless architecture for ecommerce. Advantech expects this will provide more flexibility, allowing it to accelerate innovation in ecommerce and launch new features faster.

In addition to improving the efficiency of sales and marketing, Salesforce has improved the experience and efficiency of the IT team.

Using Salesforce’s out-of-the-box features and preconfigured modules, the team can work faster to tailor deployments to regional needs. For example, Sales Cloud dashboards and workflows can be easily customised to suit each region’s sales management model. Sales Cloud can also be rolled out to new regions in a fourth of the time spent on the original deployment.

More broadly, Salesforce has helped reduce Advantech’s IT development cycle time by 50%.

“The transition to Salesforce has allowed the IT team to quickly implement innovative processes without additional development. This greatly enhances our business agility as teams have more time to focus on more complex challenges and requests,” said Lee.

The planned rollout of Data Cloud will bring together data from sales, service, marketing, and e-commerce so that Advantech can fully eliminate data silos and better understand customer needs.

Data Cloud will also ultimately help the business unlock the power of generative AI to improve efficiency. In addition to developing its own generative AI architecture, Advantech is exploring solutions like Prompt Builder which would allow it to automate tasks by embedding generative experiences right in the flow of work.

The business is also exploring how it can use data and AI to deliver increasingly personalised experiences.

“Bringing together consumer behaviour, preferences, and interaction history, we can predict customer needs and provide tailored products and services. This will not only increase customer satisfaction and loyalty but potentially help us expand and grasp new market and revenue opportunities,” said Lee.