Overview
BlueScope is a flat steel producer for the domestic Australian, New Zealand and US markets, and is a leading international supplier of steel products and solutions, principally focused on the global building and construction industry.
The Challenge
Bluescope engineers do all of their building design in a proprietary CAD tool that streamlines their quoting processes. This CAD tool provides lots of detailed information about a building that is being designed, and serves as the foundation for pricing and margin discounting discussions between Bluescope (the steel provider) and the General Contractor/Builder who will construct the building. This CAD tool outputs the information about a building into an extremely detailed multi-tab spreadsheet which contains the entire Bill of Materials required to build the steel structure.
This output spreadsheet is leveraged in pricing negotiations with the General Contractor/Builder, and negotiation updates are made directly to the spreadsheet. Bluescope management wanted to capture many details about the opportunity (e.g. number of tons of steel, type of roofing material, type of siding material and financial details such as total price, margin and discounts given). However, sales reps did not have time or desire to input the large number of data points that management found useful. They did not want to re-key this data from the spreadsheet into Salesforce.
Solution
By introducing the Spreadsheet Muncher, Bluescope sales reps were able to just attach the finalized spreadsheet to an email and send that email to a special Salesforce email address that was set up to listen for these quote spreadsheets. The Spreadsheet Muncher instantly searches through the spreadsheet and extracts the specific fields needed to populate the Account, Contact and Opportunity records (according to management request) all at the same time.
Over 100 fields are extracted and automatically populated, and those fields are scattered throughout the different Objects in the data model. Because the data is mapped to multiple objects, the update runs smoothly across all objects to allow users to instantly see their results in Salesforce.
Result
By enabling sales reps to email their final negotiated results into Salesforce, management is able to gather and report on actual deal results in real time with over 100 data points available for their reporting and analytics needs.
Sales reps save several hours per deal of data entry tasks – as the records are now automatically populated. The organization processes over 3000 Opportunities per month in this model – so the data re-key savings is substantial across the global footprint of the organization.
