Dave Sarge

Application Analyst , Grosfillex

Grosfillex, an international company based in the Jura Mountain region of France, has grown from a wooden tool handle family-owned company to a global organization offering a wide range of resin products. Grosfillex has built its outstanding brand reputation on the design, development, production, and marketing of resin products destined for household and commercial use. Grosfillex sets a standard for excellence throughout the industry with its strict criteria for quality at every level 

Its North American operations include manufacturing facilities and distribution centers in Pennsylvania for The Consumer Product Division and Commercial Product Division. These operations share the common goal of providing customers with quality products, prompt service and on-time deliveries.

Supernova Award Category: 
Next-Generation Customer Experience
The Problem: 

With more occurring online, Grosfillex recognizes dealers and consumers may overlook or misunderstand the extensive array of products available on our e-commerce site. This prompted our sales team to dedicate more time to customer account strategies, ensuring they were well-informed and offered the right products. This proactive approach not only boosts sales but also provides a comprehensive furniture solution from a single vendor.  Recognizing customer profitability as key area to focus on, the sales team encountered a hurdle. Manual data extraction from various systems for analysis sometimes took up to 3 hours to create a single account plan, making it impractical to efficiently create account strategies thousands of customers. Consequently, valuable time was unknowingly spent on high-profit accounts instead of nurturing low-profit ones, resulting in a significant loss in revenue.

The sales teams were also challenged with the new customer activation process and sought a swifter solution, as it impacted the on-time delivery of products and overall customer experience. The existing manual process involved numerous emails with document attachments circulating through multiple tasks, consuming employee time.  Lack of real time visibility into the process prevented users from promptly identifying issues, which delayed activation and subsequent timely delivery of products impacting crucial events or the opening of new establishments for hotels or restaurants.

The Solution: 

Infor CloudSuite M3 allows us to take advantage of the Infor OS Platform to optimize our processes, beginning with Infor ION workflow for automating new customer activation.This workflow allows us to assign tasks to various individuals involved in customer creation.  Additionally, automated email notifications are sent to users upon task completion, ensuring seamless communication and customer activation updates.

With the vast amount of customer data to be analyzed, the Infor OS Platform already automates the collection of data from M3 into the Infor Data Lake for subsequent analysis. We leverage Infor OS integrated services Infor AI and Infor Birst to generate a customer profitability dashboard, personalized for each salesperson, enabling them to focus their time on the right accounts. On the 1st of each month, this information is automatically updated and available on demand so salespeople can access high, low, and medium profitability gradings for their accounts.

The Results: 

Grosfillex acknowledges the necessity of embracing technology innovation to remain competitive in a post-pandemic, enduring outdoor furniture market. By adopting advancements such as AI and automation, we elevate the efficiency of manual processes so our salespeople can focus on delivering a positive experience throughout customer interactions. This approach enables us to furnish our customers with a curated selection of products, with timely delivery.

There was revenue loss due to inefficient use of time for account planning, where a more focused approach could have been applied. A notable incident occurred when an account surfaced on the  AI dashboard, and we were unaware of an ongoing business relationship with them. In researching the account, this dealer only had a limited selection of Grosfillex products on its website. The immediate response was to contact them and express our gratitude for their continued business. The conversation revealed that they had placed just one order in the past 12 months. However, we are optimistic about cultivating a stronger partnership, aiming for them to place dozens of orders in the next 12 months.

The manual customer activation process, conducted through emails and the subsequent investigation of delays, not only consumed valuable employee time but also resulted in dissatisfied customers. With the new workflow, we have automated the entire activation process, providing real-time visibility and 1-2 days for activation. 

Metrics: 

Customer profitability analysis challenges: 

  • Manual process:  Three hours to prepare profitability analysis for one customer account 
  • Lost revenue:  Not enough time to analyze all customers as each salesperson has hundreds of accounts 
  • Less effective sales team:  Time wasted on highly profitable customers and not enough time spent on less profitable customers 

Infor AI generates profitability grading of low, medium, and high and presented in the Infor Birst dashboard: 

  • Increased revenue: 10% revenue increase within a week by expanding the product assortment for a specific group of low-graded accounts.  
  • Increase in gross margin:  5% increase in gross margin % within a month by making pricing adjustments.  
  • Enhanced sales productivity: 83% improvement in sales productivity as time to prepare for customer meetings decreased from 3 hours to 30 minutes. 

Customer/supplier creation challenges: 

  • Manual process with email and phone exchanges across multiple people can delay the creation of new ID in the system, preventing goods from being delivered on time 
  • Manual process is error-prone and provides no visibility into the activation process to address issues quickly 

Infor Enterprise Automation streamlines new customer activation: 

  • 86% faster customer activation (from 2 weeks to 2 days), improving customer service and on-time deliveries  
  • Improved productivity and accuracy with assigned user tasks directly keyed into the system and real-time visibility into the status of the activation  
The Technology: 

The Infor OS Platform offers ION Workflow to create new customer activation, triggered each time a new customer form is uploaded and begins task assignment until the customer ID is created.

The Infor OS Platform offers all the capabilities to create customer profitability insights.  Infor Data Lake provides data to create an Infor AI model using a clustering algorithm to generate the high, medium, and low customer profitability results, and is then presented in the Infor Birst dashboard.

Disruptive Factor: 

The AI and automation projects have provided more value than we initially expected.  We worked with the Infor team to prioritize pain paints and began the projects to solve these specific pain points.  It turned out that we also solved more problems we didn’t even anticipate. 

For example, we didn’t realize customer profitability insights provide a better understanding of customer behavior to identify potential issues with the online website experience and take corrective action so we can increase e-commerce transactions. Customers with lower grades may not be purchasing a best-selling product line that aligns with their needs due to inadequate online product representation or visibility. This led us to collaborate with the digital team to implement necessary web fixes to attract customers to the best-selling product lines. 

Automating new customer creation using ION Workflow not only increases the speed at which we can activate a new customer, but it also keeps an audit trail in the system, so we know who was involved in approving a customer.  It also prevents any errors to ensure the right salesperson is assigned to the new customer so they receive their commission and promptly address customer issues. 

Shining Moment: 

I’m a one-man IT shop so taking the time to learn or keep up with advancing technology can be challenging.  I’m proud of the fact that I partnered with the right team at Infor to get value from the innovation capabilities available with Infor OS Platform without compromising my service to the business.  In fact, these new solutions developed with Infor have led to time savings and increased business satisfaction, in addition to substantial enhancements in customer experience.

About Grosfillex

Grosfillex builds its outstanding global reputation on the design, development, production, and marketing of outdoor solutions perfect for the food service, hospitality, and home industries.  For more than half a century, Grosfillex commits to a standard of excellence that provides its customers with quality products, prompt service and on-time deliveries.