Atlantic Technologies, the international ICT consulting company with over 20 years’ experience in the manufacturing sector, has announced that Biesse Group UK, has seen a performance increase in a range of customer service metrics through its introduction of Salesforce Service Cloud, supporting a 30% revenue increase in the last financial year.

Biesse is a global machinery manufacturing company with eight production plants, 39 offices, over 4,200 employees and 300 international resellers. It is an international leader in machinery technology for processing wood, glass, stone, and advanced materials. The company began its digital transformation with the goal of connecting all subsidiaries as “one company” while ensuring that both global and local needs were addressed, such as regional processes and regulatory requirements.

Biesse’s digital transformation has seen automation introduced to its field service operations, improved visibility across the business with real-time data sharing, improved customer service and better risk management across its sales and manufacturing processes on a global scale.

Stephen Bulmer, Biesse UK Managing Director

A new approach to manufacturing sales

One of the biggest challenges Biesse faced was ensuring consistency in the way machines were specified, configured and ordered across subsidiaries and that this information was accurately synchronised between offices and HQ.  Biesse knew that solving this would reduce errors in the ordering process and give better visibility to all key stakeholders.

Working with Atlantic Technologies, a new Configure, Price, and Quoting (CPQ) tool was built within Salesforce Revenue Cloud. Named SCOTT, the solution brings together thousands of SKUs, with rules governing dependencies and compatibility defined that allow sales teams to more accurately cost and configure orders, as well as project delivery timescales.  This not only helps set the right expectations with customers, but has reduced order errors, improved efficiency and leads to smoother customer service experience.

“We have seen an improvement in all our KPIs since introducing Service Cloud, most by more than 10%,” said Stephen Bulmer, Biesse UK Managing Director. “Our KPIs are focused on customer satisfaction and improving the customer experience. It has been a whole team effort, technology is just part of the story. Service Cloud has highlighted the areas we needed to work on to meet our objectives which has helped our revenues grow in 2021 by approximately 30%.”

Driving improved service across manufacturing

Introducing Service Cloud has transformed the Biesse UK customer service experience, as well as streamlining internal processes. Every customer interaction is now recorded, and customisable dashboards allow the measurement of KPIs in any number of areas at a customer level.  This is underpinned by the real-time sharing and integration of data.

“Our goal at Biesse UK has been to bring all internal and external processes and communication together through digital transformation, keeping the customer at the centre of the whole project,” added Bulmer. “Taking this approach has improved our customer experience, internal operations, communication and service department through digital transformation. Working with Atlantic Technologies has meant that not only have we achieved this, but its team has worked with our subsidiary to ensure local needs are met, providing support that has certainly helped our team transition to the systems and processes.

“Service in the field has also been improved over the last two years with better case visibility, allocation of engineer and technology resources and proactive customer support.  This has been enabled through Service Cloud integration with SOPHIA, Biesse’s digital platform, which automatically opens cases in Service Cloud when a machine produces an error in the field. Often, a service case has been logged and scheduled at Biesse, before the customer realises there is an issue with one of their machines.”

“Biesse’s digital transformation vision to reality has been a fantastic partnership for Atlantic Technologies,” said Denis Pytel, Solution Architect at Atlantic Technologies. “They are reaping the benefits of cloud-based SaaS technology in the Salesforce platform - the bringing together of processes and data in real-time on a global scale, enabling new efficiencies, transformative processes and real-time visibility across the business. We are seeing this movement a lot more in the UK- the need for UK manufacturers to make data-driven decisions is critical to ensuring success and being one step ahead of the competition.”

“If you have not already started the digital transformation of your manufacturing operations, then waste no more time,” added Bulmer. “It doesn’t need to be all encompassing, identify the main pinch points and focus on those.  Take time to choose the right partner and have the right change management processes in place, so that users are involved in the project and help drive the adoption of any new systems and processes.”