Customer success story
Expedeon expedites medical research with Rapidi
A life-sciences supplier replaced a failed NAV-to-Salesforce integration with Rapidi. Reporting that used to eat whole days now runs on its own, and the sales team can see for itself how accounts are performing.
Expedeon supplies reagents and equipment to drug developers and molecular biology labs, selling direct to end users. Its CRM manager was rebuilding financial reports by hand from three or four sources, and an earlier integration from another vendor had proved too complicated and too expensive to maintain. Rapidi now mirrors accounts and contacts between Dynamics NAV 2017 and Salesforce in both directions, with products, sales and payment history flowing from NAV and new opportunities flowing back.
Talk to an integration expert
About Expedeon
Expedeon facilitates pharmaceutical drug discovery by optimising the workflow, with reagents and equipment to produce, identify and diagnose using DNA, antibodies, proteins and more. It is a leading and rapidly expanding provider for drug developers and other molecular biology companies, and it is today part of Abcam.
The company sells directly to end users, which keeps costs down for customers and maximises return from the value chain. That direct relationship also gives Expedeon more room to cross-sell and upsell. It has offices, labs and factories in the US, the UK, Australia, Spain and Singapore.
What a difference the data makes
Kittiphat Chanthong, CRM Manager for Expedeon, does not hide his enthusiasm about what the integration did to his working week.
I used to spend all my time producing reports with data from multiple sources, including Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Salesforce, but now that we have integrated Salesforce with NAV 2017 using Rapidi, I’ve got 60% of my former day back.
That time went somewhere useful. “Now everyone has the data they need at their fingertips, I have more time to spend on optimizing our CRM, training, and having face-to-face meetings with people to understand how to further optimize our business processes.”
The change reached well beyond one desk. “Rapidi has changed our processes massively. Before this implementation I had to basically try to combine 3 or 4 different financial reports with data from Salesforce. Sometimes I had to upload data to Salesforce manually to put together a complete financial report.” The sales team felt it too: they can now see how accounts are performing, whether invoices are outstanding, whether payments are being chased. Before, they had to ask the financial controller, and often could not get the data in the detail or the format they wanted.
Expedeon now works at a higher level of understanding of its own business. “We can focus on trends, our sales team can look at the products customers are buying, and can see opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.” Chanthong produces financial reports for all five regional operations without difficulty, and sends more relevant reports to every stakeholder.
It seemed so difficult before Rapidi
Rapidi was not Expedeon’s first attempt at connecting NAV and Salesforce. An earlier connector from another vendor did not run well at all: too complicated, too many layers of data flow, and difficult for the team to manage. Every fix they asked for came with a cost that had not been communicated up front, so they decided to move away from that model.
There are lots of potential solutions to connect Salesforce with other services, but to find one with an easy implementation is quite rare. Finally we came across Rapidi.
Having lived through a poor first implementation, they came to the search with a sharper set of requirements: data quality, reliability and security. They brought a detailed list of concerns to the meetings with Rapidi, and got answers to them.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Seven pages: the failed first connector, the requirements that followed, what the integration moves, and Kittiphat Chanthong in his own words. Yours after one short form.
Requirements to reality
NAV and Salesforce do not always hold data in the same shape. “We have to extract the correct data from NAV, and present it in a workable form in Salesforce,” says Chanthong. “It’s not as easy as it sounds.”
Because data quality mattered so much, they chose a tight integration. Account and contact data in NAV and Salesforce is a mirror image, synchronised in both directions, which reduces accidental duplication. Information on products, sales and payments, including historical data, flows from NAV to Salesforce, while new opportunities flow the other way.
Reliability was simple to state and harder to deliver: the connection had to be up all the time. Security was the third leg. “We are a trading company, and have lots of sensitive data on our customers. There have been many security breaches at other companies, so cyber security has to be at the forefront of our concerns.”
We rely on this data all day, every day, so it has to be accurate, and the system has to be up all the time. Because we have a lot of data from our customers, as we usually sell directly to them, we obviously have to maintain a high level of security. Rapidi convinced us that they could meet our stringent requirements. When the implementation was completed they had indeed addressed everything, to our satisfaction.
The onboarding set the tone. Chanthong explained what he needed, and the Rapidi project management tool and consultant took it from there. “I knew what I wanted and we were able to come up with solutions by working collaboratively. It was actually a very pleasant process. I really liked that the Rapidi consultants were not just focused on implementing our current requirements, but also thinking about future needs, and making the implementation more robust.”
His confidence grew as the work went on. “As I became more familiar with the dashboard during implementation, I became increasingly sure that the system would meet our needs. It seemed very flexible, easy to understand and, equally importantly, reliable.”
Experience in operation
In day-to-day running, errors are rare and easy to place. “As we have had more experience and training, errors are reported by Rapidi only once or twice a week now, and they are usually due to data entry errors. We have good visibility of the problem through Rapidi’s dashboard, so it’s easy to isolate and fix the problem, and then the synchronization can occur properly.”
The first support request after go-live was to add some fields from NAV. “It was very straightforward. Within 24 hours of explaining what we needed, it was working.”
Advice for others
Chanthong has one piece of advice for companies weighing up whether to build the connection themselves.
You might be tempted to develop such an integration solution in-house, but you will not save time or money. It actually saves costs and headaches in the long term to take advantage of the experts.
Running Salesforce and Dynamics NAV?
Tell us which NAV version you are on and what you need to see in Salesforce, and we will tell you whether a standard Rapidi template covers you.