Manufacturing Success Story: Bemis Associates

About

Bemis is a 100-year old, worldwide adhesives and specialty films company—trusted by the world’s greatest technical, performance, luxury, and lifestyle brands. The company focuses on close collaboration with designers, developers, and factories to devise solutions that help make products higher performing, lower profile, and more engineered to fit.

Challenge

Bemis has been highly respected and successful in the adhesives business for more than 100 years. Fast-paced and ever-evolving, the company has grown rapidly, with a sales force that has been expanded by 20 percent in the last year alone. The company’s business model is unique and complex, built upon market innovation and strong relationships with a handful of the world’s most recognized brands. In fact, 80 percent of sales efforts are focused on those brands. What adds complexity to the model are two factors:

• These brands have multiple divisions working independently on new product development. The Bemis sales organization needs to engage divisions in those companies with which they do not currently have relationships and help each brand understand the existing value that Bemis has already exhibited throughout their overall corporation.
• These companies do not always require factories to use a specific adhesive, so the Bemis sales organization also needs to establish relationships with these manufacturers to create consistency within the brand’s manufacturing process.

Significant increase in global competition prompted Bemis to evaluate every aspect of operations, making improvements to keep their strong competitive position. The evaluation resulted in a list of challenges and goals, centered primarily around processes and outdated tools that affected visibility and communication:

• The sales and development organizations located all over the world did not have visibility into one another’s customer and product data as well as samples being tested and developed at any given time. As a result, duplication of effort, lack of a product application library and missed opportunities were serious issues.
• Since Bemis works directly with factories as well as brands, the goal was to “marry” the brands with the factories to gain exposure across every division of each brand, as well as with the factories they use to generate new opportunities and expand existing relationships.

Solution

Bemis needed a globally-available CRM application to manage a centralized client master and track rela-tionships between the sales and development organizations, the brands, and the factories those brands use. They needed a central repository for sales and development activities, enabling disparate business units to share intelligence, cross-sell, and connect for more comprehensive penetration into the market.

After assessing solutions including Salesforce and OnContact, Bemis selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, which offered:

• Integration with Microsoft products (such as Dynamics AX, Outlook, and SharePoint) in which users already spent the majority of time
• An online option that addressed the need for global accessibility from anywhere and on any device
• A flexible, scalable platform to accommodate rapid growth and product innovation
• Multi-language and multi-currency functionality to support a worldwide organization

Bemis engaged HSO to work with their internal IT team to design a new solution and manage the implementation. Bemis Process Manager Tracy Bourgoine would lead the team not only in implementing Dynamics, but also in addressing process improvements and taking advantage of every efficiency offered by the product. The team concentrated on re-engineering and optimizing processes that addressed their challenges and goals:

• Detailed tracking functionality helps employees visualize the relationship among the customer, factory, and brand. For example, one factory might do work for several brands.
• A single, end-to-end sample process replaced separate spreadsheets for sales and development organizations all over the world to track what is being tested and for which brand at any given time. Sales can contact customers proactively to ensure samples are tested, results delivered, and initial requests fed into the opportunity pipeline.
• The sales staff relies heavily on trip reports—lengthy documents created in Microsoft Word and emailed. Action items were buried within them and rarely seen or addressed. A new process tracks this data within CRM, so tasks are visible and actionable.
• Trade show lead prioritization and assignment was automated. A portal interface was developed to allow collection of potential customers and initial requests for custom samples.
• ClickDimensions—the company’s marketing automation tool—was integrated and now “lives” within CRM, streamlining marketing processes.
• A complex data security setup was applied for the “private” client development funnel.

Results

The two most significant benefits of the Dynamics implementation are improved global transparency and collaboration:

• Providing visibility into customer/factory/brand relationships enables the sales staff to identify and capitalize on new opportunities.
• With proactive processes and coordination between Sales and Development, duplication of effort is eliminated, customers are better served, and more opportunities are fed into the pipeline.
• Automated marketing processes that are better coordinated with Sales have resulted in more leads, better follow up, and higher conversion rates.

With complete data visibility to everyone around the world, plus improved processes for tracking relationships and business development, teams work together more cohesively and efficiently. Sales and Development see the same data, so the sales process is more effective. Bemis is continuing to work on a mobile initiative and a customer portal.