Nilkamal’s attempt to boost the effectiveness of its sales people with Salesforce was being stymied by an inability to efficiently link the SaaS-CRM tool with Nilkamal’s ERP. Could IT find a way? The Organization: Nilkamal is a Rs 1,500-crore company best known for its almost iconic plastic chairs. But less known is the company’s other business including plastic crates, containers and bins, and metal pallets for manufacturing and retail companies. In April 2010, about 45 percent of it's revenues were generated by this part of the business. Business Case: Nilkamal’s businesses are driven by a 300-strong sales force spread across the country. As Nilkamal’s feet on the street, they meet with product managers from, say, a manufacturing company who would purchase plastic crates from them. With a vision of empowering the sales team, Karan Doshi, who leads IT initiatives at Nilkamal, purchased 200 Salesforce. com licenses for the company’s key sales agents.
84
Case Files.indd 62
j u ly 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD
Nilkamal
* By Varsha Chidambaram
But he soon realized that Salesforce alone wasn’t going to get the job done. The SaaS-CRM offered mobility for reporting, a useful thing especially for a sales force that wasn’t expected to be office-bound. But Salesforce didn’t have access to critical business information sitting within the company’s ERP. And without that sales people had their hands tied. The Project: “For a sales guy to be able to make a sale, he needs to know a client’s latest delivery status, pending payments, etcetera. All of this information resided within the ERP,” says Doshi. As a result, despite having a cloudbased CRM model, Nilkamal’s sales found itself spending a disproportionate amount of time talking with managers at head office over lengthy, longdistance calls. That manual dependency negated some of Salesforce’s advantages. First Steps: Doshi had to take a call that most CIOs dread: Integrating middleware with his ERP. His earlier tryst with SAP PI was a disappointment, he says. “We were running SAP PI to integrate our ERP with Salesforce for one of our retail outlets. It was excruciatingly slow.” Months of research lead him to middleware vendor Fiorano, whose ESB solution was exactly what Nilkamal needed, says Doshi. It was fast, allowed bi-directional access, and integrated beautifully with SAP.
Karan Doshi, Manager, Nilkamal, found a novel way to integrate SAP with Salesforce.
The Challenge: Integrating the middleware was easy, says Doshi. According to him, Fiorano went live in 45 days, against the projected 60 days. The real challenge, however, was integrating various ERP databases. “ERP is a complex giant. Unless you have a dedicated team of ERP experts such an exercise is impossible. For any successful ERP integration project you need to invest in the right skill sets,” says Doshi. The Benefits: Fiorano essentially acts as the link between Salesforce and SAP. When a sales agent sends a query on Salesforce, it, in turn, queries Fiorano which
then talks to Nilkamal’s ERP. It then throws back all the relevant information to Salesforce. And this happens both ways. “Unlike traditional point-to-point coding systems, this is a multi-point visual code that seamlessly transfers information across disparate systems. The tool can integrate not only with SAP but with other applications that Nilkamal may decide to integrate in the future,” says Doshi. Doshi expects the middleware to achieve ROI in less than a year. CIO Send feedback to varsha_ chidambaram@idgindia.com
Photo by kap il shroff
casefiles
Vol/6 | ISSUE/09
7/11/2011 4:20:23 PM