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  1. #11
    Long Hauler geotex1's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Canyonlight View Post
    Rob - always appreciate your expertise in so many areas.

    Curious, how long have you all been using this ? What is being implemented to address the issues ? Longer term, do you think it will work as intended and if not, what next ?

    Dan
    All great questions! Grab a coffee or cold one and sit down for a read...

    The company got on Salesforce about 2007 in the US, strictly for CRM purposes at that time. For everything else, we had built our own internal architecture and programs to track manufacturing metrics, quality assurance/quality control, etc., that was also integrated with inventory tracking of both raw materials and finished goods and customer complaints/product issues that rapidly allowed us to track the material all the way back to what raws went into it and which line(s) it was produced on and even who was on the shift that produced it. At that time, there was nothing out there that could tie the facilities together - keep in mind facilities were all over the US, Chile, Argentina, Spain, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, India, China, Korea, Japan, India, Malaysia, and Australia... Then technology really started moving faster than we could keep up with our internal developers, especially because at that time we were in a huge expansion mode building new plants, retrofitting old plants, and began buying the competitors - so integration became a huge challenge and the customer base grew at an exponential rate! Salesforce marketed us pretty hard with Service Cloud prior to their launch, which I recall was 2009ish, and by late in 2011 we were running it. There was a significant investment in training of the global Technical Services team, which included every plant's manager and assistant manager, all foreman for each production shift, all QA/QC folks - nearly 300 people. There was no AI-aspect then and, of course, it was up to us to populate and create flows. By 2015, it was was making a huge impact reducing the time to resolution across the board by 18%! The self-service aspects absolutely invaluable for exchanging knowledge - like having all of the details recorded when a Tier 1 plant resolved a manufacturing issue and a Tier 4 across the world was having the same thing with a SKU. This unburdened my team at least 25% and I was able to keep the R&D teams completely focused on new product and process development and using Technical Services folks took over qualifying new raw materials and refining manufacturing and production processes fully embracing Lean Six Sigma.

    We had taken a lot of what our home-built architecture and programs did into this platform, but most manufacturing and quality aspects remained outside of it (there was no native support for this) which was ok because it let our internal folks focus on modernizing those and eventually we had internal talent that could integrate this with the Service Cloud. Around the same time Service Cloud really then started to grow and be very relevant insofar as the crowd-sourcing aspect because so many facets of the industry were on the platform. Meanwhile, our global Sales Team was fully on and exclusively using Salesforce Sales Cloud - at that time, 100% of the worldwide Sales Team were company employees - and the 150-year-old, one family built company kept a wall between sales and manufacturing and R&D. That wall was guarded by my Technical Services team - we were the focused, bi-directional interface and it worked!

    However, when the fourth generation of the family took over completely, there was a LOT of infighting, power struggles, and half of them had zero interest in the business and just wanted to be bought out by their siblings. They quietly looked for a buyer, and an excellent European company presented, great fit, same market space, knew us and we them, and it was seen as a positive from ownership to line worker. However, in the 11th hour, a publicly traded, American firm that knew absolutely nothing about the vast majority of the company, our markets, or our customers slid in with a big offer they had to borrow heavily for because, as part of our thorough vertical integration, we owned the world's largest reserves of an extremely versatile mineral used in everything from beauty products to water filtration to coatings to casting sands to nuclear waste repositories, and they wanted this... Well, the 4ths sold us to them and, of course, the new ownership knew better and started doing everything they perceived would increase their profits and make things more efficient. Understand the new ownership was US-focused and absolutely unfamiliar with the global markets. So their changes included a two year process of completely removing internal salespeople and replacing with sales reps and direct-to-distributor, and I cannot even get into what that caused without a campfire and cold ones!

    Just imagine a highly technical sales team that understood the products and applications where most were from the practicing industry before "retiring into sales" replaced by a widely varying cross-section like a Millennial selling the product as a side hustle to making bank in Crypto and Real Estate, guys that rep your products as well as your two competitors' and put whatever one on the job that lands them the largest profit, order takers at distributor warehouses, guys that make deals at floor and still expect a commission check! Sure, some of the original Sales Team opened their own businesses and are a pleasure to deal with, but...

    The new owners believed the problem was the separation between sales and support, versus the reality of having a majority of sellers that know little to nothing about the products and rejected my bid to increase the number of Technical Services personnel in order to train, help regain eroding market share, and fundamentally field the incredible volume of support requests. Instead, the new owners knocked over the wall I mentioned previously, Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds are intermingled, and the support requests have skyrocketed, time to resolution increased nearly 400%, the self-service was not established for interaction at this level, and the AI is therefore ineffective. They're distracting R&D folks and plant QA/QC from their primary functions. Satisfaction with support is at an all-time low when, before the ownership change, the company in all of our market spaces was regarded as the best in support, the most technically proficient, and rightly so as we originated so much of the technology and products now copied by others.

    The blinders are coming off now, and the ownership paid a $500K to a consultant to come in to study the business to tell them what's wrong. Well, their conclusion with the healthy price tag is exactly what we told them. It's too late to recover the talent that's been lost, but direction can be changed. I'm filling the bench on my team, they're hiring back into the company sales leadership to oversee the reps and distributors, and they are going to spend a healthy sum of money for focused efforts to 1) script support requests so there's consistent detail, categories, and base questions that will be used in automated priority ranking, and 2) establishing a much more basic level of self-service help with an end means to escalate if drilling through the self-service cannot get a conclusion. For instance, the Technical Services folks have constructed self-service to address "hot-melt bonding failure of VBF-5 on needled scrim" - pretty foreign right? For someone at a distributor, this needs to read something like "plastic backing peeling off" with subsequent interaction that will help identify it as VBF-5 on needled scrim by presently product names, etc. So, like other posts following your post suggest, it's all about what's in there and at what level that will define usefulness and effectiveness...
    Rob & Nikki + Cloverfield
    2020 Grand Design Solitude S-Class 3350RL
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  2. #12
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    Wow. Quite a read there Rob. What surprises me is I can identify it with having gone through similar 'upheavals" in my career. Not the same, but same enough that I'll bet I know what the changes of morale was like at your workplace throughout. From stages of confusion as to what you are supposed to be doing now, to anger, to helplessness, to indifference. It takes quite a bit of effort to get those negative mind sets changed.
    Where I worked, an 'Excellence' program was implemented and all the front line supervisors paid it lip service while in the background doing the job however they pleased. Which made for about 50 supervisors going in 50 different paths. It was quite a challenge to overcome.
    2018 Dodge 3500 6.7 Cummins SRW w/Aisin
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  3. #13
    Site Sponsor sande005's Avatar
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    My own experience has never been on Rob's scale, nor with SalesForce per se. But similar in implementing several large integration systems intended to replace a patchwork of home grown processes. I always hated the "resistance to change" speech Sr, Mgmnt used as an excuse for things not going well - it always was a failure to understand why a current process was in place, that was now being thrown out, rather than integrate the reasons it existed. That and unreasonable expectations about "how" a front line person was to feed the system, usually dependent on them doing it exactly in the prescribed way, with no way to accommodate unique situations. Hope GD sidesteps most of that. It can be done, but requires a LOT of time and effort to plan before implementation.

    And never forget the definition of a consultant: "Someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is"!
    2017 Imagine 2670MK
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  4. #14
    Site Sponsor ajg617's Avatar
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    Rob,
    Just a great post on lessons learned that no matter how efficient any integrated product suite can be, any efficiencies can be irreparably lost with a 'new' C-suite that thinks 'they know better' by empowering chosen staff that had no clue wrt the technical acumen and real world experience needed to provide and support core products/services. I've experienced this three times in my career in environments where revenue (or in one case political mileage) trumped every single recommendation for improving failed processes well documented by the staff that had to live with them. I'd also add that processes are only as good as the staff that has to implement them which makes retention of trained and qualified personnel a necessity. Unfortunately, today's employment scene is anything but conducive to retention.
    Robin & John
    2020 Ram 3500 LB SRW 4WD Crew Laramie 6.7HO Aisin, 55gal Titan
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  5. #15
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    In my career, I've lived through several SAP integrations and SalesForce integrations. Don't miss those times. Sales people can spend all of their time inputting data and call reports into SF and not having time to visit customers!
    New: 2021 Solitude 380FL
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  6. #16
    Big Traveler
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    Quote Originally Posted by Captcolour View Post
    In my career, I've lived through several SAP integrations and SalesForce integrations. Don't miss those times. Sales people can spend all of their time inputting data and call reports into SF and not having time to visit customers!
    I only went through one. Quite a paradigm shift from what I was using previously.
    2018 Dodge 3500 6.7 Cummins SRW w/Aisin
    2021 Reflection 303RLS
    New to RV'ing since 1997

  7. #17
    Long Hauler Canyonlight's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by geotex1 View Post
    All great questions! Grab a coffee or cold one and sit down for a read......
    Rob - just WOW.....sure glad I didn't ask 6 questions lol !

    Amazing response.....can't thank you enough for taking your time to share your experiences and detail to this degree. I'll have to read a couple more times to comprehend. Gosh if you have a conversation with Jerry McCarthy, I suspect he would VERY much appreciate spending time with you to learn and hopefully improve his experiences......and ultimately ours as owners. Sure hope this program works for GDRV.

    If we ever meet up I'll have to make sure I have a semi-load of fire wood and large beverage truck to last through your incredible work life (and maybe life in general) experiences conversations !

    Thank you, again for sharing all this.....much appreciated.

    Dan
    Last edited by Canyonlight; 01-30-2023 at 02:05 PM.
    Dan & Carol
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  8. #18
    Setting Up Camp
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    My question is why now and not before. My guess is that the ex grand design people who are running Brinkley who don't have to take no for an answer anymore on changes has acted as a catalyst for this change. In the RV industry those who put manufacturers on a pedestal due to late changes are usually disappointed. Yes my statements are harsh but the owners of an rv take the brunt of weak management and poor construction and little or no quality control on the line. Sometimes things are just smoke in the wind.

  9. #19
    Setting Up Camp
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    Quote Originally Posted by geotex1 View Post
    All great questions! Grab a coffee or cold one and sit down for a read...

    The company got on Salesforce about 2007
    I've similar experiences in manufacturing with ERP implementations and with bringing in SalesForce. You are more than correct that it's all in the implementation. SalesForces (now in 2022) is easily the best most robust CRM on the market. I'm hopeful that GD will implement well and the staffers will get on board quickly.
    Gabby
    2021 315RLTS Hensley Arrow
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