Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Analytical-Instruments Firm Uses CRM Solution To Help Measure Up with Its Customers
Overview
Country or Region:North America and Latin America
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
JASCO Inc.provides analytical instruments to biotech, scientific, and academic communities in North and Latin America.
Business Situation
Differing and incompatible software systems prevented JASCO’s sales force and customer service personnel from efficiently sharing key information relating to customer accounts. Manual entry processes increased labor costs and errors.
Solution
JASCO adopted Microsoft® solutions, including Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Windows®Small Business Server 2003, to centrally manage its customer relationships.
Benefits
Lower costs
Increased revenue opportunities
Improved collaboration and communicationamongteams
Significantly reduced data entry errors
Increased revenue opportunities
Improved tracking of customer sales and service cycle / “Microsoft CRM has provided our service engineers with the ability to review case histories and more effectively manage their workloads.”
Frank E. Mason, Chief Executive Officer, JASCO
JASCO Inc.is a leading provider of analytical instruments to the biotech, scientific, and academic communities in North America and Latin America. JASCO needed a system that allowed its employees to get an integrated and accurate view of its global customer base across sales, service, and distribution. The company also needed help automating many of the manual processes required to service customers optimally. With these requirements identified, JASCO turned to Avrio Group, a Microsoft® Certified Partner, for Microsoft CRM (now part of Microsoft Dynamics™) solutions to manage its customer relationships throughout the sales and customer service cycle.
Situation
Keeping track of more than 13,000 accounts and 23,000 contacts is a daunting process for any company. But for JASCO Inc., which provides analytical instruments to the biotech, scientific, and academic communities, the company’s biggest challenge was having eight disparate databases track sales, customer service calls, sales forecasting, and shipping orders from around the globe.
“To support our company’s expansion, both in personnel—dispersed throughout the U.S. and Latin America—and in market focus, we required a system to support a rapidly changing demand for efficient and integrated workflow, real-time analysis of our sales and service activities, and access to critical up-to-date information as needed,” says Frank L. Gunsallus, Vice President of Operations at JASCO. “Our old system did not support this requirement, and as we began growing, the error rate within our inherent work processes increased. Clearly, we needed a system that we could trust—both short- and long-term—to support our growth.”
Solution
To help improve customer management, JASCO chose to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) solution for its business. The company selected Microsoft®CRM to give both the sales and customer service staffs a single, integrated tool to manage all customer activity.
By using the Microsoft CRM workflow feature, JASCO’s sales department automated many tasks that were previously done manually. Order acknowledgement letters, for example, are now automatically generated. After an invoice is generated and the product ships, Microsoft CRM automatically notifies sales representatives, customer service employees, and customers. The new system also tracks warranty and service contracts for every analytical instrument the company sells.
“Now that we have all the data in a single place, we can focus on cross-selling and upselling products to generate additional sales,” says Cathy McFadden, Office Manager at JASCO. “Microsoft CRM gave all departments within our organization the ability to share customer information and manage accordingly with a 360-degree view of our customer needs.”
JASCO’s management team is enthusiastic about the improvements. To make the system run even more efficiently, the company bought a new server. From a cost perspective, it made sense to adopt a Microsoft server solution—the Microsoft Windows® Small Business Server 2003 operating system—instead of purchasing components separately. Small Business Server 2003 provides JASCO with a reliable and dependable software solution on which to run their business—eliminating the frequent and costly work stoppages that occurred when the old server crashed. Furthermore, Small Business Server 2003 has helped save the company money, because it doesn’t require an IT professional to keep the system running.
“The server system has been very stable compared to the previous solution, and you don’t need to be an IT professional to manage the Small Business Server,” says Gunsallus. “Before we had the SBS, our servers were going down every week, and we’d lose valuable staff time while we waited for service calls. The SBS is already proving to be a great value.”
Benefits
JASCO now provides its customers with improved and more responsive service, because the Microsoft CRM solution can now store and manage all customerdatain a central location.
Lower Costs,IncreasedRevenue Opportunities
For Frank E. Mason, Chief Executive Officer of JASCO, the benefits of adopting Microsoft CRM are striking.
“Microsoft CRM has provided our service engineers with the ability to review case histories and more effectively manage their workloads. The ability to review other engineers’ findings has decreased our
onsite labor time,” says Mason. “We are also able to track service warranty periods more accurately, letting us communicate renewal and expiration dates to customers and more easily determine which service calls are covered under warranty and which are not.”
Improved Collaboration and Communication
Implementing Microsoft CRM has also prompted JASCO to document its business processes. This exercise has helped departments collaborate and communicate more closely with one another on customer orders and service requests.
JASCO officials say that businesses need to think through their operating processes, find ways to streamline workflow, and take advantage of Microsoft CRM software.
Jasco also recommends that other small businesses that are considering using Microsoft CRMtake the time to define the types of reports and metrics they need to keep their operations running more profitably.
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship
and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to: