One Documill across vehicle brands, clouds, and documents

Summary

“Implementing document automation across the board is a key initiative for us as a leading auto manufacturer. It keeps us ahead in today’s stiff competition. But it’s also a mainstay of a great customer experience – the kind that makes customers come back to us again and again.”

The benefits

When it comes to document automation, the biggest wins for our automotive customer’s Salesforce users and admins are:

• One solution providing a unified user experience across document types, brands, and Salesforce clouds
• Faster sales cycles
• Higher productivity
• Consistent, repeatable high document quality
• Radically reduced template maintenance effort
• High compliance with key information security certifications: TISAX Level 2 and ISO 27001: 2022
• Documill’s five-star customer support.

Conclusion

Smart document automation enables new business strategies for this leading auto manufacturer.

Automotive ambition: control over sales and contracts

A few years ago, one of our customer’s European country organizations decided to switch to the Agency Distribution Model (ADM) from the dealer-based vehicle sales model.

In short, this means that the manufacturer takes over from the dealer the full ownership of the information sharing, pricing, and contracting in the value chain.

Meanwhile, the “agent”  — previously dealer  — still maintains a key role: consults the buyer, offers test drives, deals with handover logistics, and maintains the premises for these.

…And the challenges that followed

However, to be able to take over the activities like price setting, contracting, and billing, this manufacturer needed a robust, versatile document automation tool. It should be fully integrated into their Salesforce and replace their existing set of disconnected tools that allowed no way to:

• generate high-value documents like contracts based on predefined templates
• establish repeatable processes for circulating and approving documents per type and purpose
• utilize a templated approach across car brands to reduce maintenance work — while conforming to brand styling and preferences
• ensure consistent compliance with industry standards and regulations.

In line with the company’s overall targets, the aim wasn’t only to adopt a new business model, but also to boost productivity, accelerate sales cycles, and yet ensure higher customer satisfaction.

Enter Documill

After comparing solutions for Salesforce-embedded document generation and workflow solutions, this manufacturer chose Documill. It would serve them in the immediate implementation as well as the long-term development of their automated document processes.

Apart from pure technical prowess and flexibility, Documill proved strong also when it came to compliance. For our customer in its tightly regulated industry, the TISAX and ISO 27001 certificates Documill holds made valuable proof of high security.

The first document templates and workflows went live in 2023 and are delivering the desired results in the new modus operandi, ADM.

Multi-brand templates and workflows

Currently, each Documill document template (and workflow) serves five different brands at once. The templates faithfully adhere to each brand’s styling and branding guidelines, which naturally is a key requirement for a leading, renowned manufacturer.

This has made the Salesforce admins happy. Without the need to build separate templates for each brand, they can cope with a considerably lower administration workload.

Another vital aspect is that all the related workflows are triggered via the Documill Task API (application programming interface). It enables initiating document generation by:

• pressing a button
• changing specific data in Salesforce, or
• calling up a dedicated APEX code by the user.

Implementing automation across the board is a key initiative for us as a leading auto manufacturer. It keeps us ahead in today’s stiff competition. But it’s also a mainstay of a great customer experience – the kind that makes customers come back to us again and again.”

Some of these automations run in the Salesforce Sales Cloud, others in the Experience Cloud. The ones active so far include the following.

Order acceptance/rejection/cancellation document

Customer orders are managed with Order Acceptance, Rejection, and Cancellation documents. These alert a sales agent to the acceptance decision on each proposed customer agreement.

Solution highlights include:

• multiple layouts and fonts supported
• custom layout and styles enabled
• document generation via API
• workflow automation based on conditional logic: “if…then” statements control the flow of a process by executing different actions, based on whether a specific condition is true or false.

Customer order and contract

The Order and Contract documents are printed by the manufacturer’s sales agents for customers buying a new vehicle. They get physically signed by the clients at the dealer sites.

In essence, these documents list the vehicle specifications, its pricing, and details like delivery and warranty conditions.

Solution highlights include:

• custom layout and styles
• complex data structure with SOQL queries and filtering
• calculation of the sum total
• document generation via API
• workflow automation based on conditional logic.

Benefits

To summarize it all, by implementing Documill, our customer achieved a robust, versatile, and highly secure solution for its ADM strategy. By the same token, it has raised speed, productivity, and customer experience to a completely new level for these key customer documents. The highlights are:

• One solution with a unified user experience across document types, brands, and Salesforce clouds

• Faster sales cycles
• Higher productivity
• Consistent, repeatable high document quality
• Radically reduced template maintenance effort
• Compliance with key information security standards: ISO27001 and TISAX
• Documill’s five-star customer support.

“Documill’s solutions and way of working fully align with our long-term aspiration and strategy.”