Unifying post-acquisition operations for a specialty chemical manufacturer

The challenge

Growth through acquisition creates opportunity, but it also creates complexity. When a large specialty chemical manufacturer and distributor acquired a smaller company as part of its expansion strategy, the two businesses couldn't operate as one. The acquired company ran on its own tools, its own processes and its own way of doing things. Nothing was in sync.

The problems were immediate and layered. The manufacturer's sales process was heavily manual, slowing down every stage of the pipeline. The existing CRM lacked any built-in lead assignment logic, leaving the sales team to manage routing by hand with no reliable system behind it.

The acquisition brought its own complications. The smaller company relied on a ticketing system that made customer order fulfillment cumbersome and error-prone. Meanwhile, the manufacturer's sales team had limited visibility into enterprise resource planning (ERP) data, making it difficult to make informed decisions at the point of sale. And across both entities, there was no reliable process for managing sample requests and dispatch, which is a critical function in specialty chemicals.

Two companies, two toolsets and no clear path to alignment.

The TELUS Digital solution

TELUS Digital implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to give the manufacturer a modern, unified foundation — one that could support both entities and replace the disconnected systems each had been operating on.

The engagement focused on three core areas. First, TELUS Digital built a lead assignment process directly within Salesforce, enabling the platform to route leads to the right queue automatically based on defined criteria. This removed the manual overhead that had been slowing the sales team down and introduced consistency where there had been none.

Second, the team created custom objects and fields to bring ERP data into the Salesforce environment. Sales team members gained direct visibility into the data they needed, without having to pull from external systems or rely on manual exports.

Third, TELUS Digital developed a streamlined workflow for the sample dispatch team, replacing an ad-hoc process with a structured, repeatable one that reduced friction and improved fulfillment accuracy.

The result was a single platform the manufacturer and its acquisition could both operate on in alignment with each other.

The results

With the Salesforce implementation complete, the manufacturer moved from two fragmented systems to one unified platform, and the difference was immediate across sales, service and operations.

• All client data is now captured, organized and accessible in a single platform
• Leads are assigned automatically through Salesforce, eliminating manual routing
• ERP data is visible to the sales team directly within the Salesforce environment
• Sample management and dispatch now run through one efficient, unified process
• Both the parent company and the acquisition operate with a consistent brand experience across teams