CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Littelfuse Integrates Salesforce with SAP and
Speeds CRM Implementation
Streamlined Workflows Shorten the Sales Cycle and Eliminate
Departmental Communication Gaps
As a longtime SAP professional, I have been pleasantly surprised
at how easy it has been to link these two products together. Salesforce
knows how important other systems are to our overall success, so the
investments they’ve made in the AppExchange API will truly benefit
customers like us.
—Bill Schlemm
IT Systems Project Manager Industry
Manufacturing
Geographies
Global
Challenges
:: Obtaining up-to-date information on the
company’s 50,000 parts, critical to the
sales process :: Establishing specific workflows and
collaboration between sales and product
management to identify the right parts
for customers and prospects
:: An integrated CRM solution to bridge
the gap between SAP and product
management
:: Anytime, anywhere, offline access in a
multicurrency and multilingual system
Solution
An SAP shop, Littelfuse selected Salesforce
for its internationalization, Web-based
access, offline capabilities, flexibility,
workflow, and integration capabilities. With
help from salesforce.com’s Professional
Services organization, Littelfuse used the
AppExchange API to integrate the SAP parts
master into the Salesforce product object;
the solution went live in 12 weeks
Results
:: By streamlining the part selection and
refinement process, Littelfuse shortened
its sales cycle and increased customer
satisfaction
:: Sales, engineering, and product
management groups now collaborate
during the sales cycle to ensure the correct
parts are specified
:: Parts created or modified for one customer
are productized and easily added to
the parts list to be available for other
customers
:: Product marketing uses Salesforce to
understand what parts will be driving
future revenue; manufacturing can better
anticipate production requirements :: Sales reps enjoy anytime, anywhere access
to multilingual sales information
Link my enterprise ERP system with cost-effective CRM—without involving my IT staff. Make the
system easy to use, and let my employees connect to it from anywhere, any time, in any language. And
implement in less than a month. For global electronics supplier Littelfuse, those were just some of the
requirements for a new customer relationship management system.
The company, which sells more than 50,000 electronics parts to the automotive, telecommunications,
and consumer electronics industries worldwide, managed its deals in spreadsheets, with no integration
into a back-end SAP system holding all the critical parts information. With sales cycles that could
stretch over many months, during which time new parts were often created and modified to meet
customer requirements, Littelfuse needed to provide up-to-date parts information; anywhere, anytime,
and offline access; and multilingual, multicurrency capabilities to its global sales force.
Could SAP’s CRM offering fill the bill?
As an SAP shop, Littelfuse did look at SAP’s CRM offering first. But the company didn’t believe
the SAP CRM was ready for prime time and felt its users were not ready for the level of systems
sophistication required by the SAP solution. An SAP implementation also promised to be more
complex than Littelfuse’s overworked IT staff could tackle in the required timeframe.
“ We had acquired numerous companies, and our IT staff was inundated with projects to integrate
these operations and get them up and running on our SAP system,” explains Bill Schlemm, IT Systems
project manager. “In addition, SAP’s CRM module lacked some of the key features we needed as a
global company.”
After evaluating several leading products, the company selected Salesforce for its internationalization,
Web-based access, offline capabilities, flexible customization, and workflow features.
A key measure of success, however, would be how well Salesforce integrated with the company’s SAP
system. “Because parts are such an integral component of the sales process, having up-to-date parts
information, which is managed in our SAP system, available to sales teams was critical to the efficiency
and effectiveness of the sales process,” says Schlemm.
“Opportunities typically require two to four months to become qualified,” he explains. “During that
time, the sales team works closely with the customer to select the right parts. Often, we may have to
modify an existing part or prototype a new one to meet the customer needs. This process demands
that sales teams have accurate and timely parts information and also that engineering has visibility into
customer needs. With SAP managing master parts information, we needed to push that information
into the Salesforce system so everyone has easy access.”
Integration: A Two-Week Affair
To perform the integration, Littelfuse decided to leverage the tools provided by SAP and
salesforce.com rather than invest in expensive third-party integration products. “Our needs were
relatively straightforward. The parts data just needed to flow from SAP to Salesforce, and the rate of
change necessitated only a weekly update, although we wanted the ability for ad hoc updates,” says
Schlemm.
It’s a nice closedloop process enabled
by Salesforce and the
integration with SAP.
The net effect is to
shorten the sales cycle
and increase customer
satisfaction.
—Bill Schlemm
IT Systems Project Manager To meet the sales team’s product-visibility needs, Littelfuse had to move six fields from SAP
to Salesforce. SAP experts at Littelfuse collaborated with salesforce.com’s Professional Services
organization for the integration. “We used SAP’s Advanced Business Application Programming
(ABAP) language to extract the parts information from the materials master to a flat file in the
structure Salesforce needs,” Schlemm explains. “From there, it was easy to use salesforce.com’s
AppExchange API to get the data into Salesforce.”
With the Web services-based AppExchange API, customers can connect to Salesforce using
virtually any programming language. To accommodate the various tools and platforms of its
customers, salesforce.com offers developer toolkits for Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, and Ruby on Rails.
For Littelfuse, the salesforce.com Professional Services team developed in .NET, writing a program
to load product data from the flat file into Salesforce, overwriting existing data if necessary.
The integration took about two weeks. “We used the standard Salesforce products object but added
a couple of fields to accommodate all the parts data,” says Schlemm. “The AppExchange API is
easy to use and very robust, which made the project painless.”
Closing the Loop Between Departments
With the integration, sales reps can now accurately select the correct parts based on product name,
description, catalog number, product code, and so on and associate them with an opportunity.
More importantly, workflows with engineering and product management teams—also users of
Salesforce—allow collaboration during the sales cycle to ensure the right parts are specified.
“A customer may often require a prototype part or an existing part with a slight modification,” notes
Schlemm. “With engineering involved, they can work with the customer and produce the required
parts. These new parts are then added to the parts list and become available to all customers. It’s a
nice closed-loop process enabled by Salesforce and the integration with SAP. The net effect is to
shorten the sales cycle and increase customer satisfaction.”
Others within Littelfuse also benefit from the integration. Product marketing uses the opportunity
data to understand what parts will be driving revenue moving forward, which allows the group to
revise forecasts, modify product strategy, and make planning adjustments. And the manufacturing
group can anticipate production requirements while waiting for deals to close.
Littelfuse plans more integrations between Salesforce and SAP. “Our parts integration was so
successful, we’ve decided to integrate our customer master with Salesforce,” says Schlemm.
“As a longtime SAP professional, I have been pleasantly surprised at how easy it has been to link
these two products together,” Schlemm adds. “Salesforce knows how important other systems are
to our overall success, so the investments the company has made in the AppExchange API truly
benefit customers like us.”
For More Information
Contact your account executive to
learn how we can help you accelerate
your CRM success.
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CS - Littelfuse - V1 - 5/06