Case Study: Sherwin-Williams
Business Issue
The Automotive Finishes Division of Sherwin-Williams has 200 company-owned stores that distribute products and services to collision centers, dealerships, body shops, fleet refinishers, manufacturers, and OEM suppliers—in short, for anything that has wheels. One of the Division’s biggest challenges had been quantifying data on sales activity. Management employed sophisticated spreadsheets to manage its data, but cause and effect relationships remained out of reach. As Sherwin-Williams introduced new sales initiatives and areas of focus, it recognized the need for CRM.
Requirements
- Open source
- On-premise deployment
- Ease of customization
- Integration with the Blackberry mobile platform and IBM Lotus Notes
The Solution: Sugar Enterprise
The Division looked at Salesforce.com as well as some of the legacy providers of CRM including Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics. It also consulted Sugar partner CorraTech to help evaluate open source CRM solutions. At the end of an 18 month evaluation process, Sherwin-Williams chose Sugar and launched a 20-employee pilot with its Chicago sales group in the summer of 2010.
Business Benefits
- Demonstrated superior sales performance for the pilot group
- Provided greater visibility into sales activity for management
- Delivered a positive user experience
