ARGO-HYTOS: Raising the bar for customer relationship management with a user-friendly global solution
Transparency that elevates opportunity management
ARGO-HYTOS wanted to encourage sales teams around the world to record customer activity in the same way on the same system. With support from experts at SAP, the manufacturer deployed the SAP Sales Cloud solution, helping teams act as one in identifying, recording, and meeting customers’ needs for “everything hydraulic, beyond expectations.”
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Baar, Switzerland | >1,000 employees |
reduction in manual effort to create an opportunity.
reduction in manual effort to manage a sales process.
seconds to create a new contact.
Global Account Manager, ARGO-HYTOS Group Ltd.
Getting global teams on board with consistent activity management
ARGO-HYTOS Group Ltd. understands better than most how the right components help determine a machine’s efficiency and lifespan. That’s why the hydraulic and filtration systems provider goes the extra mile to find the best solutions for customers. This applies whether customers require innovative hydraulic solutions for mobile or industrial applications, intelligent sensor technologies, or advanced filtration systems.
Based in Europe, ARGO-HYTOS wanted to grow sales in the Americas and Asia. With manufacturing plants from Germany to Brazil and sales offices around the world, the company needed to document customer activity carefully and share information smoothly across the globe. But its legacy customer relationship management (CRM) system made it difficult to properly link and manage interactions and maintain comprehensive customer relationship records. This created manual work and sometimes led to delays in responding to requests for proposals or other information.
Nico Köpfer, global account manager at the company, says, “Worldwide, we have seven production entities and 14 sales entities. Our colleagues in India might handle a customer project in a different way than the team in Europe, who in turn might handle it differently than our U.S. colleagues. We needed a consistent CRM approach that would bring those 21 entities together so that production and sales could work together in the same way on global projects.”
To eliminate silos, the company wanted to streamline the integration of sales quotations and orders with the opportunity management system—a process that would require careful coordination and process understanding from sales teams. It also wanted to capture feedback from salespeople, including infrequent users, to help ensure that the CRM system met their needs in an intuitive way.
Industry Manager for Construction, International Applications Engineering Department, ARGO-HYTOS Group Ltd.
Adopting a sales-focused solution that can grow with the business
ARGO-HYTOS decided that SAP Sales Cloud was the solution it needed to align its global CRM efforts. The solution’s robust connectivity would allow the company to organize sales data efficiently and link crucial components, such as opportunities, visit reports, sales quotations, and orders, for a unified view of customer activity. SAP Sales Cloud integrates smoothly with SAP S/4HANA, which the company is also deploying, enabling comprehensive master data management and efficient data flows.
With a strong focus on sales operations rather than pure management reporting, ARGO-HYTOS wanted the new CRM system to be user-friendly and engaging. It also had to be adaptable so that business processes aligned closely with sales teams’ needs. The company was confident that SAP Sales Cloud would tick these boxes to provide a streamlined experience for its salespeople. The solution also offered potential for continuous enhancement and adoption of technologies such as AI to help meet future needs and foster growth.
Dr. Matthias Hirtz of the company’s international applications engineering team explains that robust communication was key to uncovering issues with the old CRM system and satisfying the requirements of different international entities. A strong emphasis on training sessions that enabled discussion in small groups was another success factor. Hirtz notes that the implementation team created its own training manuals for the solution’s 170 initial users, aligning these with the company’s communication style.
But perhaps one of the most important success factors was the assistance offered by the SAP Customer Experience Services organization. As Köpfer says, “We were changing two of our main systems in sales: ERP and CRM. We needed support from experts, and those experts could only be the guys from SAP. Our CRM project went so well, and the relationship we built with the SAP team was a key contributor. It was a partnership.”
The implementation, planned to take a year, was split into two phases: integration and internal processes. The company devoted significant time to establishing best-practice processes—for example, taking around five months to build the complete opportunity process.
Global Account Manager, ARGO-HYTOS Group Ltd.
Unifying global teams with a streamlined and transparent CRM system
Having met its one-year implementation deadline in partnership with SAP, ARGO-HYTOS has already seen many benefits of its new CRM system. With sales activities and documentation—from opportunities and visit reports to quotations and orders—now connected in SAP Sales Cloud, efficiency and traceability are significantly enhanced. Integrated master data on accounts, products, and contacts has improved data quality and enabled easier maintenance and access for salespeople.
Activity reporting and information sharing across the global company are also improved. For instance, as Köpfer explains, account hierarchy functionality in SAP Sales Cloud provides an instant overview of activities in the case of a large customer operating across multiple geographies.
In terms of opportunity management, a new guided selling process has reduced project run-through time and works smoothly for both internal and external teams. Hirtz notes that it takes just five minutes to validate a new opportunity after a brief review of essential information entered by a sponsor. Greater transparency also means that less time is spent on pursuing leads that are unlikely to be won.
Meanwhile, predefined activities with standard timelines as well as integrated processing of quotations, orders, and invoices help sales operations in general run more smoothly. Hirtz adds that a comprehensive overview of all the opportunities for which a team member is responsible also supports better capacity planning that’s “based on figures on a screen rather than instincts or guesswork.”
Widespread adoption of the CRM system by diverse sales and production entities across the globe speaks to the company’s success in offering a solution that people want to use. Köpfer says, “It is so much easier to manage accounts and contacts now. Creating a new contact in the ERP system was quite complicated before. Now, you can do it in 30 seconds, and that contact links directly to SAP S/4HANA.”
Hirtz describes how the solution has fostered greater cooperation across the globe. “Before, managing an opportunity was a one-person show. Now, we can see immediately who the players are, and everyone works and interacts as one team on one system.”
Industry Manager for Construction, International Applications Engineering Department, ARGO-HYTOS Group Ltd.
Developing a vision for each customer
While planning to increase overall user numbers to 220, ARGO-HYTOS is also exploring different capabilities of SAP Sales Cloud. For instance, it wants to roll out the SAP Sales Cloud mobile app to allow sales teams to run client meetings from their mobile phones.
Köpfer sees potential in combining SAP Sales Cloud with AI—for example, to send push notifications to flag falling year-on-year sales at a customer or to prompt a visit. While the focus to date has been on activity and opportunity management, he notes that the midterm mission is now to implement account strategy directly into SAP Sales Cloud. This will give different teams, from global account managers to product managers, access to a shared overview of the vision for each customer.
Köpfer sums up his confidence in the solution as follows. “We will definitely use a lot more applications of SAP Sales Cloud in the future. Whatever happens in the next few years, I’m pretty sure we’ll find answers in the current or future version of SAP Sales Cloud that match our vision.”