Berg Europipe produces high-quality pipe lines for oil and gas transfer of crude and refined products. There are only a few steel mills in the world that can compete with Berg on the scale, quality, and variety of pipe permutations (diameter, coating, etc). Planning is critical as re-configuring their manufacturing plants can be timely, so producing the right amount of a given configuration is paramount. To effectively compete in a global market, Berg Europipe must understand the current backlog at their mills while servicing existing customers and forecasting demand 12-24 months in the future. Berg engaged Kinetech to develop a custom cloud-based Customer and Competitor Relationship Management system.
Business Need: Berg Europipe produces high-quality pipe lines for oil and gas transfer of crude and refined products. There are only a few steel mills in the world that can compete with Berg on the scale, quality, and variety of pipe permutations (diameter, coating, etc). Planning is critical as re-configuring their manufacturing plants can be timely, so producing the right amount of a given configuration is paramount. To effectively compete in a global market, Berg Europipe must understand the current backlog at their mills while servicing existing customers and forecasting demand 12-24 months in the future. Berg engaged Kinetech to develop a custom cloud-based Customer and Competitor Relationship Management system.
Solution: Berg engaged Kinetech to develop a custom web and mobile application that could support their inside and outside sales teams, as well as procurement, U.S. management and executive leadership. Kinetech migrated decades of historical data to provide insights into the global demand for their product. The application provides dynamic reporting and visualization to forecast capacity constraints while optimizing operations.
Berg selected Kinetech and Mendix because of our experience delivering custom complex applications quickly. The integrated feedback and project management of the Mendix platform combined with Kinetech's commitment to continual service and innovation solidified the partnership. The leadership of Berg was particularly impressed with the agility of Kinetech business engineers to refine and accept new functionality and implement it into the existing applications within days. Kinetech delivered the complete application within weeks of formally kicking-off development.
Results: Fundamentally, the inherent flexibility to view and manipulate past, current and forecast data has provided Berg insight into their business, market dynamics and competitors that they simply lacked before partnering with Kinetech.
Berg CRM is a full service CRM application utilized by Berg’s entire US sales organization. The sales tracking and reporting process has been automated for Berg, thus saving the sales organization an enormous amount of time and resources. Forecasts are automatically aged based on user inputs and the passage of time. Kinetech also created custom workflows to manage inbound inquiries through the project being awarded. Prior to adopting Berg CRM, the confidence in the accuracy and integrity of sales, customer and competitor data was suspect because of a lack of data governance, formalized processes and an over reliance on Microsoft Excel. The adoption of Berg CRM has alleviated all concerns about data accuracy and integrity, and now Berg management and executive leadership can be confident that each report displays only the most accurate and up to date information available.