Honeywell International Inc. Improves Usability of Customer Relationship Management System across 60 Countries
 
 

Honeywell International Inc. Improves Usability of Customer Relationship Management System across 60 Countries

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Honeywell International Inc. is a Fortune 100 diversified technology and manufacturing leader, serving customers worldwide with aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes, and industry; automotive products; turbochargers; and performance materials. Its technologies address tough challenges linked to global macrotrends, like safety, security, and energy.

Honeywell’s Process Solutions business unit—which helps industrial customers meet their business objectives by providing leading technology and services, domain expertise, project management experience, and global engineering and support resources—needed improved customer relationship management (CRM) system usability to better support sales and services organizations, which include approximately 5,000 users across 60 countries. Over time, its existing system had become bogged down with customizations that impacted performance, spurring users to go rogue and develop their own tools to meet their needs. This, in turn, resulted in inaccurate sales forecasts and a lack of visibility across sales and services processes, while negatively impacting customer service.

Honeywell worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to upgrade to Oracle’s Siebel 8.1.1.3. Through the process, the team reduced the number of system customizations by 60% to 75%, which improved application performance and usability. In addition, with Siebel CRM Desktop, sales representatives working offsite can enter sales and customer information in offline mode and upload it when they were back in the office—providing them with more customer face time. The new system also supports more accurate sales forecasting processes by automatically accumulating reports and including pipeline information in addition to run-rate sales statistics.

The Honeywell/TCS team has completed the upgrade and has migrated much of sales to the new system. They are working on migrating the service department as well.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Honeywell International Inc.

  • “Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management 8.1.1.3 will enable our sales and service teams to enhance their productivity, improve forecast accuracy, and strengthen customer relationships. At the same time, working with Tata Consultancy Services, we have reduced system customizations and laid the foundation for an easier ongoing upgrade path.” – Stacy Turano, IT Solutions Delivery Leader, Honeywell International Inc.

  • Provide 5,000 users across the Honeywell Process Systems business unit’s sales and service teams with updated customer relationship management (CRM) software to more effectively help their customers manage their plants and processes
  • Reduce software customization to improve system performance and to upgrade more easily and cost effectively
  • Simplify the user experience, so sales and service representatives rely on a standard application and processes rather than create their own tools to support day-to-day work and meet ndustrial customers’ technology and integration needs
  • Stay current on application support to reduce maintenance costs

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with Oracle Partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to upgrade from Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management 7.8 to Siebel Customer Relationship Management 8.1.1.3, improving application usability for 5,000 users in 60 countries
  • Enabled users to navigate through screens more easily and quickly to get the customer information they need to more effectively respond to customers’ needs
  • Reduced application customizations by 60% to 75%—setting the stage for easier upgrades, improving application performance, and subsequently preventing users from creating rogue systems to circumvent performance issues they were having with the old system
  • Used Siebel CRM Desktop to enable sales reps, who may work from plant sites or other locations without internet access, to update sales and customer information in offline mode and upload the data when back in the office—providing them with opportunities for more face time with their customers
  • Reduced the number of required fields in the opportunity-to-quote process from 56 to 9, making the process more efficient for sales representatives
  • Supported more accurate sales forecasting processes by automatically accumulating reports and including pipeline information in addition to run-rate sales statistics

Implementation Process

Honeywell Process Systems first implemented Oracle’s Siebel CRM in 1995, and has upgraded the system every 18 months to two years. Working closely with TCS, it upgraded to Siebel CRM 8.1.1.3 in August 2011, deploying to approximately 60 countries and completing the complex project on time and within budget. Along with the Siebel CRM upgrade, the team upgraded Siebel Analytics Applications to Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, as well as its existing transactional reporting platform to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. It also deployed Oracle Secure Enterprise Search and Siebel CRM Desktop for an enhanced user experience and mobile capabilities.

Partner

A year and a half before the Siebel upgrade, Honeywell was at a crossroads. The company needed to decide if it should move forward with a completely new Siebel implementation or if it should upgrade and develop a transition plan, so it could eliminate some of its customizations. TCS was instrumental in that analysis and then worked closely with Honeywell every step of the way through the upgrade process.

“TCS has been our support partner for five years,” said Stacy Turano, IT solutions delivery leader, Honeywell International Inc. “It handles our support, help lead projects when we customize our Siebel CRM system, and work with us through our upgrades. We work as one close-knit project team. TCS is a very valuable partner to us.”