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Era Polymers enables full customer visibility with Microsoft Dynamics

Together with Era Polymers we connected their global workforce. Era Polymers operates manufacturing plants in four countries and has sales offices across the world. With the company having expanded through acquisition they found themselves having to manage their customer data through increasingly manual processes. To ensure that they had a single view of the customer and could quickly access all customer data they chose us to implement Microsoft Dynamics, complementing their existing investment in Microsoft platforms. Working with our team they were able to consolidate all their customer data and quickly more the global sales team across to the new system. With a unified customer relationship management system in place, they’re able to ensure that all customer data is accessible anywhere, anytime and that as they explore the capabilities of the system, they have a partner they trust to help meet any future needs.

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The need for a single view of the customer

Era Polymers operate manufacturing plants in Australia, New Zealand, the US and South Africa with sales operations and customers across the world. Ensuring that they’re able to effectively track the relationship with all their stakeholders is critically important but as the company grew, they found that their existing processes were not able to scale alongside the business.

‘While we had a CRM system, as we expanded each location developed their own systems and processes to manage their clients and this created a challenge especially in terms of ensuring consistent pricing and communications across our global customer base,’ says Alex Papamanuel, Era Polymers Sales Director.

‘The primary method of communications with our customers was e-mail and as a result, we had no centralized view on what customers were buying and what pricing they were paying.’

With these challenges front of mind, they decided to invest in a modern customer relationship management platform that would not only centralize their customer data but simplify collaboration between their global teams.

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Which technologies?

Microsoft Dynamics

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Which partners?

Microsoft

‘We selected NTT as our partner for this because of their extensive knowledge and their ability to understand our business right from the start.’
Alex Papamanuel, Sales Director, Era Polymers

Delivering in an agile fashion

With Microsoft services already a critical component of Era’s application landscape, they decided to leverage Microsoft Dynamics as their CRM platform.

‘We’re comfortable with the Microsoft ecosystem and the level of integration between all the components meant that we didn’t feel the need to look further afield,’ says Papamanuel.

‘We selected NTT as our partner for this because of their extensive knowledge and their ability to understand our business right from the start. The thoroughness of their approach meant that they were able to identify what we needed right from the start.’

Following an agile approach, the NTT team conducted a two-week discovery sprint working with the team at Era to uncover their requirements which led in to implementation sprints to customize Dynamics to meet those specific needs.

This enabled them to structure the project to deliver the greatest value to Era in the shortest possible time.

At the end of each sprint, they held feedback sessions with the Era team to show the progress made up until that point and to gather additional information and chart the path forward.

Once the system was ready to go live the NTT team ensured that key members of the Era team were trained on the new system, allowing them to provide the relevant training for the rest of the users.

Unifying a global organization

With a single CRM system covering their entire global operations Era can ensure that their customers experience seamless service, wherever in the world they are. Their teams are also able to access critical information quickly and effectively with all relevant data stored on the Dynamics platform.

Unified platform

Through the integration in the Microsoft ecosystem, the team can track all communications with their customers, including accessing all emails to and from the customer which are automatically accessible through the platform.

Global view

By replacing their disparate systems, the entire organization has access to a single source of truth when it comes to all customer data. This includes all ordering and pricing information, ensuring that there is no miscommunication around these critical areas. They’re also able to accurately track their samples, quickly seeing which customers have been sent which samples and when they should be followed up.

Strong partnership

‘Part of the reason we chose NTT was that we were confident that they would be able to provide the support we needed. Even though the implementation is complete we still have regular meetings with them to ensure that everything is still running smoothly,’ says Papamanuel. ‘We know that wherever this journey takes us they’ll be there to assist and guide us.’ 

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