itsme manages to personally serve eighty thousand contacts
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Customer since
2006
With smart, scalable solutions, itsme ensures satisfied customers and doubles turnover
itsme (Industrial Technology and Supply for Mechanical and Electrical) aims to provide even better and more personal service to 80,000 contacts at 10,000 customers. The technical distributor realizes this ambition by, among other things, getting a better grip on the wishes of customers. Itsme also wants to offer every contact person a personal and streamlined online experience. Discover how itsme’s digital transformation ensures satisfied customers and revenue growth.
Family business itsme supplies components and systems in drive technology, control technology, switchgear, lighting and other supplies for industry, machine building, module construction and industrial installers. Business customers in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Romania and Spain have access to more than a million products from more than a thousand brands on itsme’s five web platforms. In addition to an endless number of products, the company also provides services such as training, consultancy and a technical support desk where professionals can turn with questions about industrial automation. A follow-up conversation with Henk Oude Brunink, director of itsme after our first conversation in 2016 about his vision and choices.
200,000 different products every year
On an annual basis, the technical distributor sells more than 200,000 different products. “We don’t often sell a lot of different products,” says Henk Oude Brunink, director of itsme. Oude Brunink has been working for itsme and its predecessors since 1992. In addition to his work for itsme, he is president of International Distributors of Electrical Equipment (IDEE) and will be the next president of the European Union of Electrical Wholesalers (EUEW). He therefore has a sharp view of the challenges of the industry and those of his own company.
“Of all the products we sell in a year, we sell half of them only once that year. What we sell is constantly changing because technical developments go so fast. For these reasons, we want to understand our customers as best as possible. Only when we know their circumstances and really understand what our customers need, we can proactively help them to be successful by providing them with the best advice and the right products.”
“Our wish list is fueled by the service our employees have traditionally provided, our traditional values.”
Responding to individual wishes
Building such a warm customer relationship and a good customer image is easier said than done. itsme serves 10,000 Business-to-Business customers – often in multi-site and multi-level sales – in five countries with a total of 80,000 contacts. The type of customers and their different ways of ordering varies enormously. Some customers prefer to order by fax, while others use advanced EDI links. itsme works for small family businesses and for large multinationals that demand the highest imaginable uptime from their suppliers and everything in between. In addition, itsme wants to proactively respond to the specific, individual wishes of individual contact persons. Oude Brunink: “That is also challenging. Because an employee expects something different from you than a manager or director. And a work planner has different wishes than the technical service or an engineer.”
To be able to respond smoothly to these challenges and to contribute proactively to the success of customers, itsme is strongly committed to digitization and automation. The OmniFuture program was set up internally for this purpose. The distinctive customer knowledge and customer-oriented service had to be supported and made scalable. “Our wish list is fueled by the service that our employees have traditionally provided, our traditional values, so to speak,” says Oude Brunink. “But also because of the expectations we have about what our customers like and what they increasingly expect from us.”
Getting to know customers with SAP Sales and Service Cloud
An important step in the digital improvement process is the implementation of SAP Sales and Service Cloud by Acorel. Thanks to this solution, itsme has an advanced CRM solution. Employees have real-time access to current and extensive customer information and status updates on any device and any location. The solution also allows them to manage appointments, capture opportunities and manage the follow-up of sales opportunities. Every question from the customer, through whatever channel, ends up with the internal or external sales department, who immediately gets to work on it. SAP Sales and Service Cloud also integrates seamlessly with SAP ECC, the ERP solution itsme uses to manage orders, deliveries and invoices. In addition, itsme also actively uses SAP Marketing Cloud. In due course, this will also include customer profiling. Oude Brunink: “With the possibilities of SAP Sales and Service Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud, we can move forward for years to come.”
“Customers can set up their own warehouse with us. They can link their own article numbers to our products.”
Streamlined customer experience with SAP Commerce
The CRM system went live in 2016. itsme then focused on the next step. In close collaboration with Acorel, itsme launched an advanced commerce platform that allows customers to order services as well as products. “We serve five countries through five commerce systems, each linked to CRM and to the country’s ERP system. The platform contains more than a million products. On average, a product has about thirty characteristics. These features help us to provide our customers with the best possible product advice. The commerce environment also functions as a corporate website for the various itsme companies in the various countries. Site and shop are seamlessly integrated into one web platform.”
Smart integration with SAP ECC
In order to respond even better to specific customer requirements, itsme added the necessary functionality to the SAP commerce environment to arrive at a unique itsme commerce platform. This was partly due to a number of smart integrations with the ERP systems. Oude Brunink: “Customers can set up their own warehouse with us. They can link their own article numbers to our products. They can also set up other things themselves, such as their own catalogues, budgets and order lists with their own order quantities. Our customers can also monitor their orders, which is extremely important for the manufacturing industry. It is even possible to download accompanying documents per order or per delivery. Think, for example, of the mandatory documentation that is required for the transport of hazardous materials. And we continue to listen and develop to meet the expectations that customers have of us.”
“For our customers and employees, our digital capabilities provide a reliable, accessible and stable foundation, even in times of COVID-19”
Revenue doubled
Oude Brunink likes the open and honest cooperation with Acorel. “We are not the easiest customer. Sometimes we are a little stubborn. Moreover, we want to be able to understand and do a lot ourselves. That can take some getting used to. Acorel handled that well.” Acorel was also ready for itsme at tense moments. “An important requirement of us was that after a possible calamity we can offer all our articles, including features, back on our web platforms within 48 hours. When that didn’t seem to work at first, Acorel looked closely, analyzed and helped out, also during the weekends and even at night. Together we discussed a lot with SAP.” In the end, itsme and Acorel were able to identify and solve the problem.
The digital transformation
itsme is still in the middle of the digital transformation. More and more customers are experiencing the benefits. The staff is also gradually becoming more enthusiastic about the new possibilities for collaboration with customers. The new approach, which is fully customer-oriented, also offers itsme all kinds of options for deepening and broadening the range of services. This could even go as far as innovative service provision for wear detection based on sensor data. There is a bright future for itsme. Oude Brunink: “For our customers and our employees, our digital capabilities offer a reliable, accessible and stable basis, even in times of COVID-19. This is one of the reasons why the turnover in Belgium in August 2020 was even 20 percent higher than in August 2019. In the coming years, we want to grow from approximately 240 to at least 400 million euros in turnover. Realize more turnover with our people, our competencies, our knowledge of mechanical and electrical processes and with our scalable tools by selling and supporting individual, personalized within the industry and mechanical engineering. That is our goal for the Netherlands and for our other countries.”
Acorel and itsme are a good match
“itsme has undergone impressive development in recent years,” said Taco Schallenberg, director of Acorel. “It is great that we can play a role in the digital transformation of itsme and the growing customer experience that is the direct result of this. The way in which itsme uses our knowledge and expertise in the field of customer experience fits in seamlessly with our ambition to help our customers improve customer loyalty and deepen customer relationships.”