Safe, secure collaboration & documents for leading European medical device manufacturer

Summary

With our highly customized and complex data model, the manual work was time-consuming and risky with errors.

 

And so was rendering the often complex document layouts, for instance, in product tables. We needed a better solution badly!”

Customer’s challenges

When our customer initially set out to choose the new document automation solution, some serious requirements were set:

• integration into the Salesforce platform had to be seamless and tight
• creation of document templates had to be easy
• and yet, complex templates and document workflows had to be supported.

Benefits

Deploying Documill brought some crucial benefits:

• higher productivity with faster turnaround and legal traceability
• brand consistency through standardized, top-quality documents and workflows
• elimination of costly errors
• easier document production and e-signatures with a click right in Salesforce
• advanced contract collaboration
• yet better customer experience: quick and accurate transactions.

Challenge: coping with complexity

When our customer wanted to speed up document generation, workflows, collaboration, and delivery, they were introduced to Documill by one of our partners specializing in Salesforce implementations.

Formerly, sales documents were produced on Word templates across the company’s business units across various countries. A host of document automation solutions was in play, too.

Populating the documents with the correct Salesforce data still happened manually.

With our highly customized and complex data model, the manual work was time-consuming and risky with errors. And so was rendering the often complex document layouts, for instance, in product tables. We needed a better solution badly!”

Starting with the usual suspects: quotes and contracts

Documill was introduced in the manufacturer’s Salesforce organization, initially to speed up the workflows of quotes and contracts, which are both high-volume documents. Time used producing them could – and would – be much better used by the sales team.

The quotes and contracts cover multiple business scenarios and regional requirements, depending on the country and offering. For example, there are templates for:

• Standard product sales,
• Service and maintenance contracts, and
• Complex solution packages, such as fully equipped operation rooms with bundled products and features.

…And with some more unusual use cases

But right from the start, Documill’s flexibility proved useful also for some rarer use cases: production of certain invoices and sales-related delivery notes. For both, dedicated automation systems exist elsewhere. However, when these documents are part of the sales process, better to implement them right in the CRM.

This also makes sense because with one Documill license, a single user can generate any document types and use cases relevant to them.

Now, speak about money saved!

Gradually, new use cases have been implemented, too.

After the initial rollout, Documill now also automatically generates medical event support agreements between the company and organizers of trade shows and medical congresses. The key data is pulled directly from the Salesforce Campaign object, where event data is maintained.

The generated agreement includes all relevant details of demo equipment delivered, including:

• item descriptions
• value
• rental fees
• return conditions
• legal aspects covering branding, ethics, and cleaning requirements.

Contract collaboration with Documill Negotiate edition

And it hasn’t ended even there. Our customer also wanted to roll out a controlled collaborative process for negotiating service contracts with its customers.

After mapping out with our consultancy partner how the complete process would look like, it became clear that an additional piece of software was needed to implement it, aside from what existed. A key blank spot was collaboration on documents with the internal and external people: redlining, commenting, and such.

So Documill Negotiate edition seemed to offer – and proved to be – the perfect building block for the purpose. Unreliable email back-and-forth was replaced by a secure process. Proper workflow automation, audit trail, and collaboration tools could be put in place, as well.

And that happened quickly through an almost instant Proof-of-Concept (PoC):

We could easily show our customer: “ok, this is how the solution could look in like a week or two in your Salesforce environment with your data.”

So why even look for another solution?

Plans for the future

Looking ahead, new use cases will be developed with Documill. One in the cards is document generation based on non-Salesforce data sources, such as the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

This solution will rely on Application Programming Interface (API) integration, allowing Documill to access and process the ERP data, such as:

• order details
• invoices
• delivery notes.

Again, the API integration enables the automated generation of consistent, branded documents, based on existing Salesforce integrations with other enterprise applications.

Multiple systems acting as one – key to complete system adoption

And going further, what could the result be with the integrations between Salesforce and other systems? Nothing less than the realization of a unified document generation framework across this medical device manufacturer’s IT landscape.

Says the representative of our consultancy partner: “Especially in the CRM area, some 80% of the users you typically deal with are sales reps, people who have no extra time, drastically speaking.”

Or as our customer’s representative says:

Also, they don’t want to use, like, 100 systems. Their time is limited; they need one simple system for all their data. And if it isn’t simple and easy to use, they won’t enter any data, which messes up the overall business.”

“Probably, we all agree that a key to ease of use is having everything easy to access, in one place. For the end user, it feels like they are using just one user interface and they can do everything with it”, says our partner’s representative.

And, if the users are bound to put the data in the system before they can get a necessary document out of it – that’s a great driver for data hygiene.

Why Documill in the first place?

When our customer initially set out to choose the new document automation solution, some serious requirements were set:

• integration into the Salesforce platform had to be seamless and tight
• creation of document templates had to be easy
• and yet, complex templates and document workflows had to be supported.

Well, Documill ticked all the boxes. You have a great technical foundation and offer so many possibilities as we’ve seen here.”

All in all, deploying Documill brought some crucial benefits:

• higher productivity with faster turnaround and legal traceability
• brand consistency through standardized, top-quality documents and workflows
• elimination of costly errors
• easier document production and e-signatures with a click right in Salesforce
• advanced contract collaboration
• yet better customer experience: quick and accurate transactions.

“You have high-quality information security and documentation – and what is known as the ‘five-star’ customer support with effective communication. What’s there not to like?”