Customer success story
First they stopped printing spreadsheets. Then they stopped typing everything twice.
Sea Breeze has been delivering beverages in the New York and New Jersey area since 1925, on its own trucks, and its reputation rests on being reachable and reliable. In 2009 the vice president looked at how his field staff actually got customer information and found the answer was a printed spreadsheet. Fixing that created a second problem, which is the interesting part of this story.
Sea Breeze is a fourth-generation, family-owned manufacturer and distributor of premium beverages on tap, serving thousands of customers across Metro New York and New Jersey from its own fleet. It ran an on-premise Microsoft Dynamics NAV, adopted Salesforce for the field, and then found itself entering the same data twice. Rapidi connected the two, first pushing NAV data into Salesforce, then extending the flow back into NAV.
Talk to an integration consultant
The spreadsheet era
The data existed. It just could not get to the people who needed it.
“We had customer data in our ERP but no way to communicate it effectively to our field staff, including sales,” says Josh Sanders, vice president at Sea Breeze. “We were still in the days of handing out spreadsheets to our sales people, which I realised was unsustainable.”
A printed spreadsheet is out of date the moment it leaves the printer, and every rep carries a slightly different vintage of it. For a company whose whole promise is being responsive and dependable, that is a promise resting on paper.
Solving one problem into another
Sanders brought in Salesforce, and it did what he wanted: the field team was better informed and better engaged with customers. But now the company had two systems of record and no bridge between them.
“Rather than handing out spreadsheets, we were doubling up on data entry exercises in manually syncing our Salesforce data with Microsoft Dynamics NAV,” he says.
This is the ordinary trajectory of a CRM rollout at a company that already has an ERP, and it is worth naming plainly: adopting the second system converts a visibility problem into a duplication problem. Somebody now types every customer twice, and the two copies drift.
Choosing on expertise, not on features
Sanders was not shopping for the longest feature list. He wanted somebody who would take the project by the hand.
I really wanted to find a company that would be willing to lead us through this challenge. We ultimately chose Rapidi for this project because they were the only vendor that could offer us the expertise we needed to feel confident with these changes to our internal business processes.
Sanders’ own summary of the build was four words: “Rapidi made it really simple.”
That is a fair description of what a mid-sized company is actually buying when it buys integration. The connector is the easy half. Deciding which records are authoritative where, and in what order to change the process, is the half that needs somebody who has done it before.
Fast first, then wider
The first phase went quickly. “Rapidi had our Microsoft Dynamics NAV data fully visible in Salesforce faster than I could have imagined,” Sanders says.
What went in was Rapidi’s turnkey connector for Salesforce and Dynamics NAV rather than a bespoke build, which is why the first phase could be measured in days. He credits the running of the project as much as the software: the setup was well organised, he had visibility into every step, and there were a lot of things to think about, but Rapidi helped him work out which to prioritise.
Rapidi expertly managed our project and answered every question we had at every step of the project. They really know their stuff!
Once the ERP data was visible in Salesforce, Sanders widened the scope. Having seen the whole customer in one place, he wanted the same picture reflected back in NAV, so the flow was extended in the other direction. The duplicate typing went away with it.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
The spreadsheet era, the duplication it created, and the two-phase integration that closed it.
What ninety years buys, and what it costs to keep
Sea Breeze’s advantage is service, built over four generations, and service is what integration ends up protecting here. A rep with current data answers the question on the call instead of promising to check.
Integration definitely super-charged our efforts here, and it’s something that’s reflected in our ability to deliver information to both our field team and our customers.
The rest follows from that: manual processes automated, time and money saved, complete and reliable customer data reachable from wherever someone happens to be working, and decisions made on numbers everyone can see. Customers notice it, and so do the people who no longer type everything twice. None of it is exotic. It is what happens when the ERP and the CRM stop being two separate accounts of the same customer.
Sea Breeze is the largest fourth-generation independent, family-owned manufacturer and distributor of Premium Beverages On Tap in the Metro New York and New Jersey area, in business since 1925. It carries hundreds of products and delivers to thousands of customers on its own fleet, with no middleman in between, so the saving is passed on. Beverages on tap rather than bottles or cans also make it, in its own phrase, a granddaddy of green. More about the company at seabreezesyrups.com.
Still emailing spreadsheets to the field?
Tell us which system your sales team actually opens, and which one holds the truth. Bridging the two is the whole job.