CUSTOMER STORIES
 
Schneider Electric sparks innovation at every level for a new world of energy.
 
 
 

Schneider Electric

Manufacturing

 

Schneider Electric power distribution products and energy management components are installed in 40%–60% of buildings around the world. Still, to power its trailblazing mission and achieve its ambitious goals, Schneider Electric must continue to make energy ever more efficient and sustainable.

In this age of instant connectivity, over 2 billion people around the world still lack electricity or reliable sources of energy. Schneider Electric, the global expert in energy management and automation, believes that access to energy is a basic human right and that today’s approach to energy management is unsustainable.

Like with so many companies, Schneider Electric’s long history with Salesforce began when the company needed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. In 2010, as part of the “One Schneider” strategy, the company launched an initiative to replace multiple vendors with a single solution shared by all employees. The advantages unique to Salesforce — a secure, trusted platform for all the customer data and a growing array of tools to leverage that data — made a compelling business case for consolidating on Salesforce.

In less than two years, 30,000 Schneider Electric employees in 70 countries embraced Sales Cloud to drive sales and service performance worldwide. Over time, the company has added Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Salesforce Platform, and more than 30 apps from the Salesforce ecosystem through AppExchange — and now has a total of more than 43,000 Salesforce users around the world.

“Salesforce has completely transformed the way we manage our customer base,” said Chris Leong, CMO. “We now have one version of the truth to rally the company behind.”

 

Before Salesforce, we had maybe a hundred different systems with little silos of customer data. Now, it’s one transversal customer platform.”

Salesforce has become the foundation within the company for customer-centric employee collaboration — enabling an increased focus on solutions, as well as connected products. That approach — solution selling, which accounted for only 10% of revenues as recently as 2009 — now accounts for more than 40% of the company’s revenue. Customer satisfaction has also improved dramatically.

And now Schneider Electric is harnessing a new power source to drive business with Salesforce: data. For example, when a building averages 82% energy inefficiency, there is a lot of room for improvement — and leveraging data is the best way to find incremental efficiencies.

“Our value proposition is around efficiency, how to make a process or building more efficient — and you can’t do that without harnessing data, leveraging analytics, and turning it into information and predictive intelligence," said Hervé Coureil, CIO.  “We wanted to move away from a very process-centric, one-size-fits-all view of the world to a user-centric process,” he said. These users — whether employees, partners, or customers — are key to the new way of doing things for the company.

Salesforce helps Schneider Electric become more predictive with each customer. By combining all the customer data with product information, the company is gleaning insights that will unleash new products and services.

“As CIOs, we can make a huge difference when we help our companies really connect the dots, connect data silos, connect process silos,” said Coureil.

Next on Coureil’s agenda is tapping the power of the internet of things (IoT), connecting Schneider Electric’s millions of devices distributed worldwide. “IoT is not really something new, because we’ve been connecting products on the factory floor and the production line for quite a while. What’s taken IoT to the next level is the cloud because of the number of connected products and the scale you can reach,” said Coureil. “And then it’s the level of analytics, AI, and predictive algorithms you can put on top of the data.”

 

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