Describe your business…
Safran Engineering Services is an engineering services provider in the aerospace and ground transportation industry. As a member of Safran group, we are headquartered in Toulouse, France but operate a total of 10 business units worldwide with around 3700 engineers. Our customers are Safran group companies but also all major aircraft OEM and Tier-1 system manufacturers, as well as automotive and railroad OEM.
What caused you to consider a custom IT database solution?
We are dealing with very large customer organization ranging from technical teams to program and procurement and often including senior management. Also on our side many team members are involved, and are often located at different sites. In this context it is of great importance to have a clear overview about all account related activities and awareness regarding customer contacts and who is leading them on our side. A further aspect is to capture and share customer interaction records.
How did you develop your SharePoint Flex solution?
Our internal team has drafted the tool specification, and after selection of the tool we worked with the tool vendor (Kerri) to set up the initial configuration. After a few pilot cases the tool has been rolled out across the entire organization. Very important was to have a competent administrator in house to provide first held and advice to users.Thanks to the flexibility of the Flex tool it was easy to adapt it to some small changes and improvements that are necessary from time to time.
Which of the Flex modules did you use?
The Flex CRM module is used to manage accounts, contacts, interactions and opportunities. We also store files connected to accounts (like org charts) or opportunities (like specifications and offers).
How long have you been using SharePoint Flex, and what have the results been so far?
We implemented the tool in 2013. The tool usage varies from country to country. Business reports are increasingly created on the basis of the information stored in the tool. Results are not measurable in terms of time, profitability or profit, but a better awareness regarding the account activities has been achieved.