Leica Biosystems: Creating a Closed-Loop, Efficient Sales Cycle

The Challenge

Leica Biosystems came to Wilco Source when they needed to bring more efficiency to their quoting process and shorten their overall sales cycle. They were using Lotus Notes, managing information that was spread across more than 250 databases. Data was hidden in various silos, creating redundancies and inconsistencies. The team wanted a single source of truth that could be accessed by the various stakeholders involved in the quoting process.

They also needed the ability to separate data by business segment across North America, EMEA and APAC regions. With data in so many databases, the sales team was continually having to track down product pricing and regulatory status of each country, as not all products could be sold in every country.

Additionally, account, product and pricing data was not automatically flowing to the company’s ERP in a cohesive way, nor could the sales team make customer or pricing updates within the system following an approval.

Leica wanted to create a closed-loop quote-to-cash process that was fast, consistent and delivered a great experience for all involved. The team also wanted the ability to calculate margin and price impact changes, and ensure information was replete across all of their systems.

The Solution

Working closely with the Leica team, Wilco Source identified the core processes of each stakeholder group––from sales to accounting to fulfillment. We looked at where there were redundancies and overlap, what could be eliminated and what could be automated. With that insight, we created a workflow that enabled the team to access and maintain account, product and pricing data in real-time.

We then migrated the disparate database in Lotus Notes to Salesforce CPQ, creating a single source of truth, and bridged the gap between SAP (Leica’s ERP) and Salesforce with stronger integrations.

The Results

The solution enabled Leica to:

• Update customer account data and status across both platforms in real time
• Quickly access product availability and which products could be sold in that country, cost of goods sold information, the manufacturing unit currency, among other product data
• Access material list prices and transfer prices for countries and regions that support multi currency
• Source customer pricing, tax/VAT/GST and freight from SAP in real time
• Quickly access customer pricing snapshots
• Automatically update approved pricing records in SAP directly from Salesforce CPQ
• Quickly convert quotes to orders and contracts, and automatically update the information in SAP and append shipping instructions, comments and package pricing