Digital to manage business partners

How many times did you think how to improve the workflow with your external business partners? Here is the solution!

I had the chance to put in place a fantastic project of Digital Transformation.

Operating within healthcare and pharma business, with enormous amount of regulatory constraints and laws & rules, the challenge seemed huge.

From 2008, the company I'm working currently, adopts Salesforce.com as CRM platform to manage the medical information activities on the markets.

The business need

In 2014 the medical device business started to grow, but not having the necessary critical mass to hire service engineers and manage internally the service (installation, planned maintenance, repair, de-installation, spare parts management etc.).

The only solution was to keep the service management via External Service Providers, but e-mail in & out and the workload with them was enormous.

The meeting held by Massimo Ferrari, Salesforce Specialist, about other topics was the turning point: he suggested us the Partner Portal technology to manage our external service providers.

That said, after Massimo’s suggestion, we managed the implementation of a pilot project to open a Partner Portal and give a disciplined access to our service provider.

We changed the entire paradigm because from that time we understood that Salesforce was not any longer only a CRM, but a pure company platform to manage many internal / external workflows.

The solution

The pilot was so successful that after 4 years this became a company best practice.

The external companies engaged are now 8, managing 4.000 devices in 14 different countries and the average amount of cases (tickets) processed it's around 2.300 and the service level perception by our customer increased accordingly.

We appreciated so much this technology that we extended the adoption to other company areas to manage customers, compliance tasks as well as vendors selection, reaching very good results.

Conclusions

Now this module is called Community Cloud and became during the years more and more complete.

I do think that a big part of Salesforce solution success is based on this incredible capability. The creation of a digital relationship with external companies is quick, safe and inexpensive.

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