Pforzheim, May 2020 – The family-owned company EKATO is considered the world market leader in stirring and mixing technology. The portfolio of the EKATO GROUP includes numerous products in this field, e.g. modular, robust and quickly available industrial agitators, individual solutions for reactor agitators through to turnkey and automated process plants. In addition, a state-of-the-art research and development center is part of the group of companies.
In order to maintain its leading position even in the age of digitalization, EKATO has decided to completely digitalize its business processes in sales. The decision was made in favor of the itmX sales software: The sales team is expected to benefit from the new solution by November 2020 at the latest.
Many reasons spoke in favor of itmX sales
EKATO has been using itmX service successfully for some time. The solution establishes lean, smooth processes in customer service – from message acceptance to quotation management to order processing with subsequent accounting. So it was obvious to choose software for sales that can be seamlessly linked to the existing service solution. “itmX sales was our first choice for a CRM system,” says CIO Joachim Gallwas, “because with itmX we have a provider that has already fulfilled our expectations in the service area.
Another advantage in this context was that the previous, extremely document-heavy legacy system was replaced by real CRM processes. Up to now, numerous different documents have been created by isolated solutions for business processes. Thanks to continuous CRM processes, the respective document can now always be accessed at the appropriate place.
In addition, trade fair notes, which were previously scanned as PDFs and then made available as documents, can now be maintained and managed using separate trade fair objects within CRM. This makes it possible to measure which activities and offers have been created at trade fairs – a manual evaluation is thus unnecessary.
This not only improves productivity; the user experience for employees also rises to a new level. “All in all, itmX presented us with a conclusive concept for the CRM introduction that completely covers our needs,” says CIO Joachim Gallwas.
Complete integration into existing SAP environment is a real plus
For EKATO it was also important that the new sales software could be fully embedded in the existing SAP environment and that existing SAP workflows could be integrated. The goal was not to create a new isolated solution with the modernization, but to optimize the existing system with an additional module.
itmX sales offers excellent document integration with folder structures and is also easy to use thanks to drag & drop or version management. In addition, itmX sales offers new reporting options. Finally, customer master data and contact person data will be available in one system in the future, which will provide EKATO’s sales department with more transparency.
How EKATO sales also benefits from itmX sales
EKATO’s service team gets a 360° view of the customer through the itmX software suite, for example via included service information and messages. Thanks to the new sales software, sales and service can work in a common system – both in the office and on the move. Other departments can also be directly integrated via SAP; seamless processes are thus possible throughout the company. And last but not least, external representatives can be given access to the CRM if required.
itmX sales was our first choice for a CRM system. Since with itmX we have a provider that has already fulfilled our expectations in the service area.
EKATO GROUP
The EKATO GROUP offers optimized stirring and mixing technology, from modular, robust and readily available industrial agitators to individual solutions for reactor agitators and turnkey process plants including automation.
In its state-of-the-art research and development center at its headquarters in Schopfheim, Germany, EKATO offers engineering services from process development to process optimization to make customer processes and mixing procedures safer and more efficient.
