CRM optimization

Customer

Our customer is a company with over 100 years of tradition – currently, one of the largest pharmaceutical groups in the world in the area of oncology. Research and drug production are the two most important areas of its activity. It is also a leading provider of in-vitro diagnostics. It employs 100,000 people in more than 150 countries and generates revenues of over 70 billion USD.

Identified problems

Over time the data volume has contributed to a significant drop in performance. For example one of the key functions responsible for planning and assigning the frequency of contacts with clients took 72 hours!
In some countries (mostly African, and a large part of Russia) connection to the Internet was possible only in a specific location, which resulted in searching for offline solutions.
Some functionalities were developed by external teams that did not have a comprehensive overview of the system, neither follow good development practices nor care about the system performance on a global level.
Planning activities across Sales Reps, Med Reps and Market Access Users were scattered and ineffective. There was a need to combine them in order to better plan activities at the regional level and to more adequately aggregate the activities of the organization in reports.

Before the project

The company used a strategic CRM system for managing the activities of 3 groups of users:

Sales Reps (responsible for contacting doctors, pharmacists and hospital representatives),
Med Reps (medical representatives contacting doctors while undergoing clinical trials),
Market Access Reps (representatives responsible for contacting the Authorities in the field of drug approval and reimbursement).

The system allowed precise profiling of contacts and provided information on the preferred frequency of meetings with a given contact, based on top-down corporate directives.

The system was intended to operate in many countries, but at the same time it had to take into account the specificity of local markets – a certain freedom in shaping the sales policy and different legal regulations.

We introduced close cooperation of Business Analysts with Product Owner to reconcile the requirements of global standards with local legal regulations. In the result we created the definition of strict Core Requirements along with a very wide range of configurable functionalities of the System.
We performed optimization work in the field of data operations along with the development of PI Tool – just to extract Territory Assignment calculations outside the Salesforce, thus reducing the time-consuming process from 72 to 4 hours.
We have developed an OTR (On-the-Road) application that allows offline users to work and synchronize with the cloud as soon as there is better access to the Internet. We have resolved the problem of synchronization between the cloud and OTR in terms of the dictionary data changed since the last login.
The original application had poor code quality (spaghetti code). Therefore, we run a code refactoring initiative, that help reduce the technical debt. This allowed to shorten the development of new functionalities by an average of 20%, and decreased the number of incidents and errors during regression testing by 30%.
The initiative to align the code of the RE and EEMEA regions resulted in an almost annual project involving about 10 FTEs. The result was the creation of a common code base for both regions, taking into account all configuration differences. This consolidation has enormous impact on the maintain cost, reducing one maintenance team.
We have combined 3 independent mobile applications into one, giving access to separate functionalities based on user permissions and profiles. In this way, the performance of applications and mechanisms that synchronize offline data with the cloud has been improved.

The benefits

Effectiveness

An effective CRM system supporting the work of 8,000 users in 68 countries around the world
Full control

We have full control over the maintenance and development of the global CRM system
Efficiency

High efficiency in the area of Managed Service
Ops reduction

Requirements refinement allowed to significantly reduce the number of operations and tasks between analysts, developers and system testers

The project in numbers

8000

users
68

the CRM operates in 68 countries
20

integrations of the CRM with other IT systems
2000

system documentation over 2000 pages
10M+

contacts and accounts in the CRM
2

independent regions with the same code of the system

Manager's view on the cooperation

Dear All, On behalf of our customers and our management I would like to thank you for big effort you put into making it possible to fix the issue. This was a huge effort with many hours of being online and try to first troubleshoot. Thanks to you we are now handing the complete system back to the users in good condition and they can work normally again.

Head of the EMEA IT

Operations Management about CRM4U
In 2016, we took full responsibility for Managed Service in an organization with a global reach. We’ve made a far-reaching reorganization of processes, including the rules of code development and deployment, the process of collecting and refinement of business and technical requirements, cooperation between roles in estimating labour.

In 2017, on our initiative, a project of the CRM code refactoring was initiated. Thus, we significantly improved application performance and avoided blockers in the future when developing new enhancements. The client commissioned us to act as Data Admins of the application, starting from Russia in 2018. From the beginning of the application, the function of Data Admins was performed by key users from a given country, so outsourcing this function proved the customer’s trust to us.

Magdalena Wałęka

Service Delivery Management Team Manager