HELLA drives productivity with modern document collaboration solution for SharePoint with Avanade

Summary

In today’s high-paced business environment, having easy access to documents on time and from multiple locations is critical for decision making. It has a tremendous effect on increasing employee efficiency and effectiveness, impacting the company’s bottom line in a positive way. HELLA, an international automotive supplier, noticed that their system wasn’t enabling access to all the information they needed. They decided to simplify an overly complex, high-risk document management system.

Challenge

As one of the leading automotive suppliers in Europe, with a specialty in lighting and electronics, HELLA’s sales force operates in 125 locations across 35 countries. And like all sales forces, HELLA’s needs to be fast and efficient. “HELLA operates globally with its clients, and everyone in our global sales team and associated business units should not only get on time access to documents across locations but also work collaboratively on the documents to ensure faster decision making” said Andreas Geiger, Head of Global Sales Excellence (GSE) at HELLA. Geiger also understood that previous client and document management solutions made life difficult for its global sales team. Valuable customer information was being spread out across multiple stand-alone servers, each with its own folder structure and naming conventions. Information was also frequently shared via email and thus, there was a need to optimize the entire document management and sharing process. This situation also made the tracking of information quite challenging for the sales people, who had to collate and manage hundreds of technical and legal documents each time an opportunity would arise.

Strategy

It was clear that a strong document management solution was needed — one that could integrate seamlessly with Salesforce.com, HELLA’s core sales system. Because Avanade had intimate experience with both Salesforce.com and Microsoft’s SharePoint platform, HELLA selected Avanade as its strategic partner to design and deliver a new cloud first solution. “We were very confident Avanade had the expertise to get the job done. We were extremely confident all the way,” said Nico Götzel, the GSE project manager who worked with Avanade for this change.

Avanade designed a cloud-based, end-to-end document management system that integrated their SharePoint Online instance with their legacy Salesforce.com customer management tool. With it, HELLA’s sales team can now automatically create a central repository for documents when starting a new opportunity, as well as collaborate with others and access much needed information, regardless of geographic location in a fast and unfettered way. “Today, all the data for customers is in a single space, making it quite easy and accessible for sales,” said the HELLA executive.

Results

By empowering sales team members to easily create, edit and track all the documents needed for their opportunities, the new document management system is improving productivity, reducing IT headaches and delivering transparency by acting as a single source of truth for customer information. The new solution “pays for itself” in time savings alone, according to HELLA.

Notably, HELLA’s GSE head said that the solution is already driving a positive return on investment. “We’ve measured the time saving improvements and this project will save hundreds of thousands of Euros a year, so it pays for itself,” Götzel reported. Another major win has been the modern capabilities and engagement this new solution is bringing to HELLA’s digital workforce. Employees no longer need to rely on others to find crucial customer information and documents. “It’s a huge relief,” he said. “Everyone is happy we no longer have to rely on the old system. And we are all really happy with the solution and the cooperation with Avanade.”

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