Sales Success With Advanced Business Intelligence

Top Semiconductor Manufacturer Deploys WebFOCUS and iWay to Enhance Its Use of Salesforce.com

Santa Clara, California-based Renesas Electronics America Inc. offers a tremendous variety of advanced semiconductor-based solutions, which includes more than 7,000 devices encompassing the combined offerings from the recent merger of NEC Electronics and Renesas technology.

Renesas measures its success by that of its clients, making customer satisfaction a number one priority. One of the company’s primary goals is to ensure that customers have easy, rapid access to the complete system solutions they need, such as semiconductors, hardware/software tools, applications assistance, and manufacturing, so they can quickly address market opportunities. To maintain these high levels of customer satisfaction, a large team of technology experts – backed by an extensive network of sales engineers, sales representatives, and distributors – deliver high levels of design service and support.

The company faced significant challenges in its sales support infrastructure during a technology upgrade. The new Renesas information architecture is made up primarily of SAP systems, which support core operations across the business. Following the lead of its European counterpart, the company was using the reporting features that came packaged with those applications. “Unfortunately, our users were very unhappy. The SAP reporting tools were extremely hard to navigate and adoption rates were very, very low,” says Viren Patel, vice president and CIO of Renesas.

The company’s North American sales force had begun to use the popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Salesforce.com, for its prospecting and lead management activities. Renesas’ sales cycles are quite multi-faceted, involving not only sales reps in the U.S., but also design, engineering, and production teams in Japan – all of whom were still using SAP. Because of the disparity between the SAP and Salesforce.com environments, obtaining complete visibility into the entire sales cycle, and generating accurate sales and revenue forecasts, proved to be nearly impossible.  

Prior to the merger with Renesas, NEC had been successfully using the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform for years. After Information Builders demonstrated how it could also meet Renesas’ needs, the company chose WebFOCUS to build a series of intuitive sales dashboards that allowed sales, product engineers, and marketing staff, as well as distributors and other external sales partners, to access and monitor the sales cycle from end to end. Renesas also chose iWay to unify the disparate SAP and Salesforce.com environments by creating a dynamic data mart, complete with real-time monitoring, where users can not only access information, but also update it.

Renesas expects the implementation of WebFOCUS and iWay to deliver a variety of benefits. It will help boost demand creation activity in North America by giving the sales force insight into design and manufacturing operations. At the same time, it will streamline engineering and production, by giving workers in Japan a greater understanding of customer requirements. It will also enable Renesas executives to more precisely predict sales and revenue, to better support strategic planning.

A Complex Sales Cycle Made Simple

The sale of Renesas products involves more than just pitching to a client. There are proposals to craft and design plans to draw up before production can begin. To ensure that products are created to meet each individual customer’s exact needs and specifications, there must be close collaboration among all teams, including engineers in Japan and sales reps in North America.  

“Our challenge involved a host of communication problems,” Patel claims. “These teams operate in different time zones and there are also cultural differences that come into play. We also have SAP systems managing activities on one side and Salesforce.com used on the other. It makes things quite difficult.”

Users were also dissatisfied with the complexity and lack of intuitiveness inherent in the SAP reporting tools. Frustrated with the amount of time and work required to generate their own reports, most users simply abandoned their efforts, leaving them little or no reporting capabilities when they needed them.

In WebFOCUS, Renesas found a product that could effectively address the needs of the diverse user communities. The broad capabilities of the WebFOCUS platform could easily satisfy the complex requirements of the technical community and the simplistic interface needs of the business user communities, while providing functionality to handle more advanced types of analysis efficiently.

Because users also needed the ability to perform searches and create their own ad hoc reports in a simple, easy way, Renesas leveraged WebFOCUS to build a series of dashboards that enabled more than 1,000 users to seamlessly retrieve and analyze information in the data mart.

“Everyone involved in the sales cycle uses WebFOCUS in a way that perfectly complements their roles and responsibilities,” Patel says. “Our sales reps can track their leads as they move through the sales cycle, from the time the prospect is first contacted until the deal closes. Our marketing staff can assess the effectiveness of their campaigns. Our engineers can monitor new prospects and see what new projects may be coming their way. Our management team can generate more accurate sales and revenue forecasts. Even our distributors use WebFOCUS to stay on top of things.”

Improving Salesforce.com

In addition to WebFOCUS, iWay is used to facilitate the seamless, real-time flow of information between Salesforce.com and end users. Information is accessed using the iWay Salesforce.com adapter, then transformed and loaded into an Oracle data mart using iWay DataMigrator. From there, users can generate reports and perform queries against that data. The iWay Salesforce.com adapter also monitors the sales supply chain in real time for changes and ensures that those changes are immediately reflected in the information contained within the data mart.

“The ability to access and consolidate data from both SAP and Salesforce.com was of the utmost importance,” says Patel. “iWay not only helped us create a data mart that unified this information, it also enabled us to build a completely dynamic environment where users can make updates to sales information, and where changes are automatically captured and shared between the data mart and the Salesforce.com database.”

Renesas is also taking advantage of WebFOCUS Maintain, a solution that adds transactional capabilities to BI systems. With Maintain, users can loop back to the data mart directly from within reports. The iWay Salesforce.com adapter then transfers those updates to the Salesforce.com database. This allows Renesas sales staff to not only retrieve and analyze the information contained in Salesforce.com, but also keep it current at all times by updating, modifying, deleting, or adding to it.

“We wanted to get the most out of our Salesforce.com investment,” Patel shares. “WebFOCUS and iWay enabled us to purchase Salesforce.com licenses only for those who really needed it. Others without licenses use WebFOCUS and iWay to access the Salesforce.com data in the data mart and make minor changes to it as needed. This, in turn, saved us quite a bit of money.”

Renesas is so pleased with its use of WebFOCUS and iWay that it plans to extend the environment with new features in the very near future. Patel sees tremendous value in adding predictive analytics and data visualization capabilities to the existing dashboards.

Patel also has high praise for Information Builders’ pre-sales organization. “Their technical team did an outstanding job. They really made their case during the presentations and POC. They listened to what we needed and did a great job of conveying how WebFOCUS and iWay would meet all our requirements. They were also extremely helpful during the development and implementation process. Working with Information Builders has been a wonderful experience.”