VIDEO: Wärtsilä innovates with Salesforce

Wärtsilä has embarked on a ground-breaking digital journey – and wants to take its 12,000 customers along for the ride.

“Digitalisation is crucial for staying competitive,” said Sini Spets, Vice President Business Development, Wärtsilä Services. “We are investing in developing new digital services and solutions that create value for our customers, so we can grow and innovate together.”

Salesforce is a key to Wärtsilä’s digital transformation, helping to unlock new ways to interact with customers and the intelligence that builds up during long-lasting relationships.

“We have data pouring through the doors, but we need to make sense of it,” revealed Tomas Hakala, Wärtsilä’s Vice President for 4-stroke Engine Services. “With Salesforce, we can turn raw data into meaningful information that benefits us and our customers.”

Unlocking information

Making information more accessible and visible across multiple functions and geographies was a key driver for deploying a global customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“We were growing with our customers and had operations in 70 countries. We needed to improve collaboration across our business and increase transparency,” explained Spets. “Our goal is to create a 360-degree view of our customers globally, so we can deliver superior services and greater benefits.”

Wärtsilä took its first step towards achieving this 360-degree view in 2007, when it deployed Sales Cloud. Hundreds of people working in sales now use the solution to manage new opportunities as well as existing customer accounts. Sami Kujanpää, General Manager of Sales Management at Wärtsilä Services, said: “Sales Cloud brings greater efficiency and structure to our global sales operation. We have been able to generate more sales with the same resources.”

As a provider of lifecycle power solutions to marine and energy companies, Wärtsilä needs to be able to track new customer opportunities over months or even years. Large projects and long-term agreements require a lot of teamwork across the sales operation.

“Sales Cloud makes account planning, sales funnel management and collaboration much easier. We can ensure we align the right resources to the right opportunities,” added Kujanpää.

Seamless customer services

Wärtsilä has also been able to achieve resource utilisation efficiencies across its services business. The company maintains 450 customer installations under long-term contracts, and performs over 100,000 field services jobs a year.

“Our customer relationships need to be based on trust: we help keep ships seaworthy and power plants operational,” revealed Hakala. “With Service Cloud, we can document the skills of our 3,600 field service professionals to ensure we get the right resource to the right place at the right time.”

Deployed in 2010, Service Cloud is also used to track customer queries and to power an online knowledge base within Wärtsilä Online Services.

Wärtsilä maintains knowledge and skills for 350 different product types, and provides 20,000 technical answers a year.

Simplifying customer access to this expertise is a key part of Wärtsilä’s digital transformation. In 2014, the company launched a range of new online services for its 10,000 users, which are underpinned by Community Cloud.

Thanks to this initiative, customers can now place and track orders for spare parts, access technical support and maintain inventories and warranties for installed Wärtsilä products.

Wärtsilä Online Services empower our customers to access information and use installation data to perform key activities when it suits them,” said Spets. “We don’t want to stop at digitising our data and services; we want to digitise the end-to-end user experience and help our customers digitise their entire business.”

Engineering the future

The €4,7 billion company has also improved information access for its nearly 3.600 field service engineers and technicians by creating a mobile app.

Developed on Salesforce App Cloud, the app provides access to hundreds of product manuals and installation bulletins.

“Prior to the app, engineers would have to load up CD-ROMs to ensure they had access to the right product documentation at a customer site,” explained Hakala. “With the app, this information is not only available in real-time but it’s also tailored to different customer installations instead of just being generic.”

Engineers also use the app to log new leads and to access their service orders, which can be updated and signed off by the customer while on site. “The app saves a massive amount of time and improves quality of service for our customers,” added Hakala.

To ensure customer information and product details are correct across all digital touch points, Salesforce is integrated with Wärtsilä’s enterprise resource planning system.

When a new solution is introduced, it’s added to the company’s offering catalogue, which is maintained in the Salesforce solution. “We can track the potential of new products and solutions against the expected ROI,” added Kujanpää.

“With Salesforce, we have greater transparency.” Spets said. “This helps us understand our customers and our business better, so we can grow, and become an even better partner to our customers.”

As a digital pioneer, Wärtsilä is already tapping into the power of remote analytics and support. For example, customers can access real-time reports and analytics to help optimise the operation of power plants and vessels around the world.

“By remotely monitoring installations and analysing the data collected, we can predict maintenance needs, which mitigates risk and maximises safety and performance for our customers,” added Hakala.

Putting customers first

Wärtsilä hopes to extend this intelligence-driven approach to other areas of its business. “We have only scratched the surface of analytics and online services,” revealed Spets. “We want to use Salesforce to better understand our sales pipeline, so we can concentrate on the right markets and make the right decisions.”

For Wärtsilä, every decision it makes comes back to its customers. From spare part deliveries to digitalised maintenance services, Wärtsilä is committed to driving continuous improvement and nurturing customer partnerships.

“We put our customers first. By helping them to digitalise their business operations, they will be able to maximise safey, boost performamce and drive future growth,” said Spets. “With Salesforce, we can accelerate the creation of digital services and digital value.”