"Oracle's Siebel business applications provide a clear, detailed picture of each customer relationship. They enable employees to identify and communicate instantly with any team member involved in a sales deal and to share information." - Veronique Zoccoletto, Chief Information Officer, Lectra S.A.

Industry: High-Technology

Annual Revenue: $240 million

Employees: 1,600

Key Benefits:

►Enabled single view of the customer, which allowed sales teams to collaborate more effectively worldwide
►Afforded the ability to close more business, more quickly
►Provided real-time, actionable insight into sales, marketing, and service performance
►Increased ability to create and execute multichannel campaigns using e-mail, telesales, and post
►Provided the ability to evaluate campaign results and tune subsequent campaigns

Lectra S.A. is a leading worldwide provider of software and hardware dedicated to industrial users of textiles, leather, and other soft materials. Four years ago, Lectra introduced a new strategy aimed at extending its growth and success. The company's primary strategic goals were to accelerate growth among large corporate accounts worldwide, achieve a leadership position in the U.S. market, and strengthen its success in China. To achieve these goals, Lectra needed to replace the various systems used to manage customer relationships, including spreadsheets, databases, and various manual processes.

By introducing Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) and analytics applications, the company has created a single, globally coordinated view of customer information. This enables the company's sales teams to collaborate globally on sales deals; manage the sales pipeline; and move more customers, more quickly, toward sales closure. It also provides Lectra with advanced business intelligence and analytics, transforming customer data into detailed insight.

Single, Comprehensive Customer View

Lectra S.A.'s solutions are present across a broad array of major markets, including fashion and apparel; luggage and leather goods; footwear; furniture and furnishings; and the automotive, aerospace, and marine industries. Through its unique international network, which comprises 1,600 staff worldwide, Lectra serves more than 17,000 customers in more than 100 countries.

"A lot of the other important information about our installed customer base, prospects, opportunities, and service inquiries resided on different departmental systems," said Veronique Zoccoletto, Lectra's Chief Information Officer. "If we sold a system to a fashion house or clothing manufacturer, we needed greater visibility into the contract, recent customer communications, parts demand, or contacts. Our vision was to optimize our sales processes based on a clear understanding of customers' needs."

Lectra deployed Siebel Business Analytics, Siebel Marketing, and Siebel Sales among 480 staff worldwide to unify customer information across multiple channels and continents. With up to 89% of revenues derived from outside France, the company's sales teams around the world were the first to take advantage of the new system. When one of the 250 sales team members initially identifies an opportunity, he or she logs the details of the opportunity into Siebel Sales. Many of these opportunities represent worldwide technology integration programs, possibly involving the implementation of a new automated fabric cutting system into an Asian or European textile manufacturing hub, with the program decision-makers and influencers residing in the U.S. The coordinated customer view enables Lectra to seamlessly connect all deal participants to present a global business case for choosing the Lectra solution.

Using Siebel Sales, the globally connected sales team compiles a single record of the individual prospect contacts, the interrelationship between each individual, as well as sales proposal documentation, together with all quotations, activities, and detailed reports. By sharing this knowledge globally among sales teams, Lectra can collaborate on sales opportunities and close more business worldwide. Today, Lectra has more than 21,500 opportunities in the Siebel system, 65,400 contacts, and a total of 14,800 active quotes.

According to Zoccoletto, the sales teams have benefited tremendously from the new system.

"Oracle's Siebel business applications provide a clear, detailed picture of each customer relationship," she explained. "They provide employees with access to a comprehensive customer record wherever they are in the world and whether they are online or offline. Siebel business applications enable employees to identify and communicate instantly with any team member involved in a sales deal and to share information. Moreover, employees can quickly view product catalogs and configure detailed product and pricing configurations for customers."

Advanced Business Intelligence and Analytics

Siebel Business Analytics is also proving to be an invaluable asset to the sales team. It provides them with advanced business intelligence and analytics, transforming Lectra's customer data into detailed insight. Real-time, personalized dashboards are helping executives, managers, and front-line sales teams worldwide to track and study the sales pipeline, opportunities, activities, and orders. Siebel Business Analytics answers questions such as "How many opportunities are live in a particular European country?" "At what stage are they in the sales pipeline?" "How many deals were closed in the last quarter?" and "What proportion of sales proposals are for leather customers versus fabric customers?"

Siebel Business Analytics delivers insight across multiple data sources worldwide and ensures that Lectra evaluates its success using a common methodology. The company has immediate visibility into the status of all pipeline opportunities, quotes, and deal sales against forecast. By helping Lectra to understand more about the success of its business, Siebel Business Analytics also enables the company to be more responsive to customer needs.

Lectra recently piloted Siebel Marketing in its U.S. and Canadian operations for subsequent global deployment. The company is already using the application to segment customers by geography, line of business, or revenue. Lectra uses this segmented customer information to create and execute multichannel campaigns using e-mail, telesales, and post. Once Lectra launches a campaign, it uses Siebel Marketing to evaluate the results and tune subsequent campaigns.

Looking ahead, Lectra will introduce e-sales and Internet functionality; deploy Siebel in several outstanding territories; and extend Siebel Marketing to enable the creation, execution, and analysis of globally consistent and coordinated marketing campaigns.

"Oracle [Siebel] enables Lectra to structure the sales offering, analyze our sales effectiveness, and network our sales teams," Zoccoletto concluded. "Where possible, we've taken the best-practice business processes of Siebel straight out of the box, and it shows. We now have a considerably more effective sales strategy, which is helping to extend our growth worldwide."

Oracle Products & Services:

►Siebel Business Analytics
►Siebel Marketing
►Siebel Sales
►Oracle Database

Why Oracle?

Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) solution offered significant outright advantages over the other systems Lectra considered. The multilingual, multicurrency Siebel solution allowed Lectra to link its many staff members dispersed around the world with a single, comprehensive customer view. Siebel CRM applications also offered Lectra the best functionality of all the systems under consideration. The company was impressed not only by the richness of the functionality and the fact that the solution could be deployed almost out of the box, but also by the fact that so many other companies use Siebel worldwide. In essence, the team believed that Oracle's Siebel CRM applications offered Lectra a best-practice approach to simplifying business processes across the organization.

Advice from Lectra S.A.

►Secure senior executive sponsorship.
►Leverage out-of-the-box functionality.
►Avoid program scope creep.

Lectra S.A. provides technology solutions and related services to the major industrial users of textiles, leather, and other soft materials.