Dan Spellman has a challenging role. “Logistics management happens at the speed of movement,” Spellman says. “You cannot be late.” Spellman, the president of leading third-party logistics firm, Neovia, oversees a vast network of diverse customers. Neovia specializes in the automotive, industrial, mining, aerospace and defense industries, where stakes are high and time is always at a premium. “You cannot be late to make corrective actions; you cannot be late to make management decisions,” Spellman explains.“Being able to do that in a time-effective manner is a very important factor of production.” And it isn’t easy.
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Neovia and the Social Supply Chain
1. Neovia and the Social Supply Chain
Dan Spellman has a challenging role.
“Logistics management happens at the
speed of movement,” Spellman says. “You
cannot be late.”
Spellman, the president of leading
third-party logistics firm, Neovia, oversees
a vast network of diverse customers. Neovia
specializes in the automotive, industrial,
mining, aerospace and defense industries,
where stakes are high and time is always at a
premium.
“You cannot be late to make corrective
actions; you cannot be late to make
management decisions,” Spellman explains.
“Being able to do that in a time-effective
manner is a very important factor of
production.”
And it isn’t easy.
With over 100 operations on six continents
and in 25 countries, Neovia’s success hinges
on delivering simple, responsive solutions to
a wide range of complex problems.
“We’re dealing with customers internally and
externally that are in multiple time zones,
multiple geographies, dealing with multiple
currencies,” says Carey Falcone, Neovia’s
chief commercial officer. In this business,
there’s no such thing as “one size fits all.”
Neovia and the Social Supply Chain 1
Neovia Case Study // Spring 2014
2. Searching for a Solution
In order to meet its ambitious growth targets
for FY14, Neovia had to think creatively about
how to manage such a broad and diverse
network of clients and connections. When it
came to providing visibility across Neovia’s
global revenue operations, the company’s
internal systems were proving increasingly
inadequate.
The executive team needed better reporting
capabilities to assure investors that the
company was on track to meet and exceed
earnings commitments, and the commercial
leadership needed better support for a
team-based selling model.
Drawing on its experience with the physical
supply chain, Neovia set out to build a social
supply chain that would plug customers,
suppliers, service providers, and employees
into a network where information could be
shared anywhere, at any time.
“We plan to put operations, IT, business
development and our legal department
as well as our financial department all
on one system, with all of our customer-
related information housed centrally, so
that everybody can access it globally,”
Falcone explains. “That way, we're all making
decisions off the same information.”
But existing CRM systems didn’t meet the
company’s needs. Out-of-the-box products
from mainstream CRM providers, such as
Oracle and SAP, required extensive (and
costly) customization.
Dan Spellman
President of Neovia
Neovia and the Social Supply Chain 2
3. Then the Neovia team found a new solution:
Lanetix, built on Salesforce1.
Lanetix offers secure, cloud-based CRM
solutions tailored to the logistics industry,
complete with an intuitive user interface
and accessible from any platform or device.
Impressed by the Lanetix team’s experience
and expertise—and by the security of
the widely used Salesforce1 platform, on
which Lanetix solutions are based—Neovia
partnered with Lanetix to build a customer
platform for global growth.
“Neovia was facing a difficult problem, but
our unique approach made us the perfect
match to solve it,” says Lanetix CEO John
Golob. “It was gratifying to see how our highly
customizable, user-focused solution could
bring Neovia to the next level.”
Much more than a CRM, Lanetix delivers a
project-based workflow and team-based
selling solution. It’s helping executives like
Carey and Spellman automate processes
that actually match Neovia’s needs as
a growing company with easy-to-script
workflows that traditional CRMs can’t
accommodate.
It means that Brad Douglas, Neovia’s senior
manager of commercial operations, can
create prescriptive workflow templates in
minutes that can consistently apply Neovia’s
sales methodology to any sales workgroup.
Lanetix Solves the Problem
Neovia and the Social Supply Chain 3
Lanetix enables the reps to think in terms of
their book of business, with a visualization
of all their projects and a central location for
all project-related resources, customer and
employee interactions.
“Lanetix is really working with us to create
the global template for third-party
logistics companies and for supply chain
management, putting information into a
format that is easy to understand and easy
to use by our people,” Spellman adds.
4. Neovia and the Social Supply Chain 4
Beyond industry-specific CRM and unique
usability for the end-user, Lanetix has
another key asset: its cloud-based system
is built on the Salesforce1 platform—an
industry leader responsible for the security
of 100,000 companies and thousands of
servers around the world. With Salesforce1,
infrastructure management is eliminated,
and the process of joining platforms or
integrating content is made easy. It also
means Lanetix shares the same security,
governance, and data handling regimen as
salesforce.com's own applications.
“What Lanetix is delivering is an industry
cloud solution built on the Salesforce1
platform,” Douglas explains.
“Having cloud solutions is about not having
to spend the time and money and effort in
supporting the system. And Salesforce.com
provides us a secure platform to develop
on.”
Salesforce.com, which invested in Lanetix,
also provides support for Java programming
languages supported by Heroku, which allow
for easy scaling and customization.
“We’re amazing at developing supply chain
solutions for our customers,” Douglas adds.
“Now, with Lanetix and Salesforce, we’re
stepping back and really optimizing our own
internal demand chain. That is key for us to
grow organically and to continue to support
our customers in the way that we do.”
A Productive Partnership
5. Neovia and the Social Supply Chain 5
With Lanetix in the hands of the field sales
team, every rep stays on top of operational
successes and quick wins to deepen the
relationship. They’re also able to track and
forecast revenue and margins.
Executive leadership uses Lanetix to
ensure that every rep complies with the
sales and governance processes in order to
mitigate the risk of qualifying, scoping, and
bidding projects. Through intuitive reports
and dashboards, management can track
progress and forecasts based on earnings
or EBITDA. For Falcone, this is particularly
important when shareholders are leaning
on him to “accurately predict the future;
to come in, not below and not significantly
above, their forecast.”
With Lanetix, Neovia is able to monitor
and manage complex processes with ease
and clarity. Lanetix’s customized solution
encourages collaboration across sales
teams and streamlines global operations.
With a global view of the business,
employees and managers understand how
their projects are tracking, where they’re
winning business, and where new market
opportunities exist.
At the end of the day, Falcone says, Lanetix
enables anyone at Neovia to “sit in front of a
customer as one company, with one voice,
and with a solution that will ultimately give
the customer a competitive advantage in the
marketplace.”
A Bright Future
Carey Falcone,
Chief Commercial Officer
6. Neovia and the Social Supply Chain 6
Lanetix provides cloud-based CRM for the
logistics and transportation industry. Based
on Salesforce1, our solutions help 3PL’s,
forwarders, and ocean carriers evolve from
relationship-based to value-creation selling.
With Lanetix, sales and operations
management gain global visibility across
account teams and the ability to forecast
based on the metrics that matter to their
business (EBITDA, capacity, and volume).
Headquartered in San Francisco, California,
Lanetix is privately held and backed by
investors such as Salesforce.com.
@LanetixCRM
linkedin.com/company/lanetix
plus.google.com/+Lanetix
www.lanetix.com
About Lanetix