Setting Up a Chemical Reaction with CRM (
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Chemical company E.T. Horn turned to a customer relationship management platform to get product information out and competitive information in faster than you can say vulcanized plastic polymers.
When you enter a store to buy a gallon of paint or fill a prescription, it would probably never occur to you to question the ingredients used to manufacture them. However, there are dozens, or even hundreds, of chemicals needed to create these products, and manufacturers buy them from one of the hundreds of chemical distributors around the globe.
But chemicals are a commodity business, so competing on price isn't an option. Instead, these chemical distributors must find a way to differentiate themselves enough to both their customers—manufacturers like Dow Chemical, Abbott Laboratories and Olay—and their suppliers (companies like DuPont, Bayer MaterialScience and 3M that create polymers and other chemicals).
The need to find a way to stand out led The E.T. Horn Company, a 105-employee distributor of raw materials in the lubrication, coatings, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food products segments, down a different path.
Traditionally, account managers at the company manually collected information from customers about products in development, the types and number of chemicals being purchased from both E.T. Horn and its competitors, and future development plans. That valuable information, however, rarely made it past the account manager, making it less useful than it could be to grow the business.
There had to be a better way.
"We realized that we had to get as much information on what our customers were doing on a day-to-day basis and what projects they are working on so we could tell our suppliers what resources we would need," said Mario Kuhn, E.T. Horn's vice president of information systems. "That way, we could manage our workload and make sure things are delivered on time."
But that was only half the battle. What the company really needed to do to compete effectively with its larger rivals was also to capture competitive information. If Dow Chemical plans to introduce a new epoxy system, for example, and the E.T. Horn team knows the customer buys epoxy but not epoxy supplied by E.T. Horn, that's key information, Kuhn explained.
The IT team settled on Saratoga CRM (now owned by CDC Software), a customer relationship management system that manages sales, marketing and customer support data and processes. The system runs on Microsoft Server 2003 with Microsoft SQL Server 8.0, and the company's database consists of nearly 15,000 customers and prospects, more than 10,000 items, and more than 300 suppliers. Order, invoicing, inventory, pricing and sales data is uploaded to the central database from an AS/400 four times each day.
