Manufacturing Success Story: Kohler

Kohler believes that dealing with them as a company should be a gracious experience, no matter whether you are a customer, supplier, or vendor – it’s one of their main brand values. However, suppliers contacting Kohler’s accounts payable department for EMEA were not always getting the best service possible.

As Chanaka Marasinghe, Manager Finance Transactions, explained, “Around a quarter of my team’s capacity was being used in handling email queries. Many of these were generic and needed to be routed globally – a process that was overly complex, time-consuming and error-prone.”

He added that this was wasting money but also importantly, he had no simple way of gathering information about “how many queries per day we were receiving, who was dealing with them and what type of questions were being asked.”

When Marasinghe approached Marcus Judge, Director, IT Services EMEA, Kohler Co, they weren’t sure what kind of solution to look for.  “If it had been a standard contact center, we would have been looking at very different tools; I don’t think we would have thought of Microsoft as an option,” he said. “But because email was the primary source of communications, we needed a solution that would deal with workflows and do it seamlessly within our ecosystem.”

Judge added that he had previous experience of Microsoft Dynamics through one of the company’s Dutch offices. Just at the right time, as Judge began looking for someone who could help, an email from HSO came “out of the blue”. “Of course, we also talked to other Microsoft Dynamics implementation partners, but it was a stroke of luck because, as soon as I made the first call to HSO, I had the impression of a business that was really interested, flexible, and ready to meet our needs.”

Kohler still went on to do a full RFP, going through the whole procurement process with three other vendors. “I would say it was HSO that had done the most work to show us what the end solution would look like. Because of this, we realized right then they understood our requirements,” says Judge.

This flexibility proved to be a winning factor. “The other vendors had a “this is the tool, take it or leave it” approach. “HSO gave us options, listened to all our feedback and worked with my team,” said Marasinghe. “HSO didn’t know who we were going to choose, but they invested time and effort designing a tool for us, listening to us in the pre-work process, and having a detailed plan of where the cost was going to be and where it could be reduced.”

HSO implemented a cloud-based approach, leveraging Microsoft 365 (Office) and using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to bridge the gap by routing communications from Microsoft 365 to the correct shared services sub team. It did this using ‘agile’ methods, which proved successful.

“This also was good timing. It was our first exposure to the Microsoft Dynamics Agile implementation model, but we were just embarking on it from an IT perspective and thinking about how we should use it. It involved using small sprints to design things, check them out, verify and adjust, and then another small sprint with a ‘scrum’, the agile term for a quick brainstorm-style meeting,” says Judge.

“This was all low key and small- rather than a large-scale Agile project, but it took us through the principles –which is intended to get you to a great solution, rather than trying to ‘boil the ocean’ right from the start. It takes small steps.”