The challenge
Solugen, a specialty chemical manufacturer known for safe, cost-effective and environmentally friendly chemical formulations, wanted to align on a future-state business process to drive more efficient sales operations and ensure accurate forecasting.
The company's commodity and spot-buy selling process lacked cohesive support. Its existing Salesforce instance did not use product, pricing or workflow automation functionality. As a result, sales reps entered opportunity values manually with no guardrails to confirm prices fell within acceptable margins or went through proper approvals.
This manual quoting process often produced inconsistent value costs and freight information, creating an over-dependence on corrective input from the supply chain team. Solugen also lacked a structured way to manage workflows for new products, including formulation, vendor and packaging type decisions.
These manual processes increased the risk of human error, revenue leakage and inefficiency. Because sales set up new customers in NetSuite only after a deal closed, supply chain management often struggled to complete financial and legal activities in a timely manner.
The TELUS Digital solution
TELUS Digital consultants developed a business process covering Solugen's lead-to-cash, customer lifecycle, product lifecycle and order lifecycle. The team proposed methods to support more efficient and accurate quoting within Salesforce, and defined the integration points needed for cost tables to flow into the platform. TELUS Digital also managed a value-based pricing model decision table to guide consistent, margin-appropriate quoting.
To address product and customer set-up gaps, the team developed workflows to support new product introduction and streamline customer set-up activities, reducing the delays that had previously slowed down supply chain, financial and legal processes.
The results
By the end of the initial engagement, Solugen had a clear path forward for its sales operations and Salesforce architecture. The engagement equipped the team to reimagine its commercial selling process with a defined structure behind it. Key outcomes included:
- A reimagination of Solugen's commercial selling process with clear, actionable direction
- A blueprinted future Salesforce architecture for the business
- Identification of areas requiring further alignment ahead of implementation
4Core business processes documented: lead-to-cash, customer lifecycle, product lifecycle and order lifecycle
4Workflow areas redesigned: quoting, cost table integration, pricing model and new product or customer set-up
