PILLER Blowers & Compressors produces high-performance blowers and compressors and customized solutions to meet specific requirements of various industries. Its global network of wholly owned subsidiaries and joint ventures enables it to serve an international customer base.
To increase customer service quality, the company wanted to share information and optimize business processes across its sales, service, and marketing activities.
Moving from Manual Processes to Integrated Activities
At PILLER, different departments were using their own IT solutions.
The service department had manual processes, such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, to dispatch service technicians. The technicians were logging into a central server to retrieve data and recording customer support by e-mails and conversations. The sales department had a basic access environment due to custom-made products with individual serial numbers. There was no master data; tailored sales quotes were done on paper, posing challenges for data updating and quality. The marketing department was conducting its business, like capturing trade-fair leads or planning and executing campaigns, by hand and with spreadsheets. All these manual activities were time intensive and prone to human error.
To enable the marketing, sales, and service teams to perform to the best of their abilities, PILLER wanted solutions that allowed it to share important information. It wished to harmonize all customer-related processes, from initial contact and order management to delivery of spare parts and follow-up.
“For new products or customers, it’s important that real-time master data in our core software is mirrored in our sales, service, and marketing systems. We can do this by integrating SAP Customer Experience solutions and SAP Field Service Management with SAP S/4HANA,” said Frank Münzner, in-house SAP consultant for Lead to Cash at PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH.
Adopting Cloud Solutions to Achieve Innovative Customer Service
PILLER employed the SAP Sales Cloud solution to help address the needs of its sales team and integrate functionalities, such as managing quotes and orders, in one place. The solution offers a search capability and a modern, intuitive user interface.
The company is using the SAP Field Service Management mobile app to help create service tickets, which are the single point of customer contact, with product serial numbers and metadata. Integrating this mobile app with the SAP Service Cloud solution can enable technicians to receive service ticket information on an Apple iPad, so they can have everything they need to carry out their work. This can also translate to good customer support.
By deploying the SAP Marketing Cloud solution and integrating it with SAP Sales Cloud, PILLER now proactively shares data, such as service tickets, lead opportunities, and customer contacts, between the sales and marketing teams. This lets the company contact a customer with a warranty option or service cost reduction, for example.
PILLER has now integrated the three SAP Customer Experience solutions for sales, service, and marketing and SAP Field Service Management with SAP S/4HANA, the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
PILLER partnered with FIS Global to gain advice about new functionalities and implementation support, while IBsolution provided guidance around leveraging the potential in terms of business transformation and digitization.
Gaining Comprehensive Customer Visibility with Integrated Solutions
The major advantage in connecting the SAP Customer Experience portfolio, SAP Field Service Management, and SAP S/4HANA is that real-time data can be available across all these solutions. While master data, such as for a new product, customer, or material, is entered and kept in SAP S/4HANA as the core software, it’s automatically pushed into the other integrated solutions.
This is helping PILLER deliver highly efficient and innovative customer service and business models. The company gains a comprehensive view of worldwide customers in real time while interacting with them at each stage of their journey in a targeted manner.
There are now customer-related processes across departments, sites, and systems as well as consistent communication throughout the company, thanks to standardized forms and templates. The business is achieving agile sales with faster response times and better allocation of target groups. It’s also making decisions for customer management based on facts and analyses.
Other benefits the company achieved were:
- 360-degree view of customers worldwide in real time
- 90% less paper with digital processes
- 30% reduction in effort by using digital processes
“We’ve always combined tradition with innovation when manufacturing our blowers. With SAP Customer Experience solutions, our customer management operations are superior to those of our competitors. We’re able to keep a close eye on processes and respond quickly and accordingly,” said Thomas Henzler, CIO at PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH.
Rolling Out Customer-Centric Solutions
Combining SAP Customer Experience solutions and the SAP Field Service Management mobile app with SAP S/4HANA is helping deliver real-time data for integrated processes.
The integration of the SAP Field Service Management mobile app with SAP Service Cloud is being piloted with three service technicians and garnering positive feedback so far.
Watch an overview video of SAP Sales Cloud to help build lasting customer relationships and learn more about SAP Service Cloud to maximize customer lifetime value with connected service. Read about the benefits companies achieved with SAP Customer Experience solutions. View a solution demo and overview video to learn how to maximize productivity and asset uptime with SAP Field Service Management. Learn what benefits other enterprises achieved.
Karin Fent is senior director of Global Customer Success Digital Supply Chain at SAP.
