To support its growth in distribution, transport company Gheeraert is investing heavily in a further digitisation of its business processes. With a workforce of 200 and over 45 million euros in revenue, Gheeraert is committed to leveraging information technology and automation in order to stay ahead in the industry. “Our customers want to engage with us through online systems,” says Peter Gheeraert, Co-owner of Gheeraert. “The way we work today is vastly different from how things were done five to ten years ago.”
To play into this evolution, Gheeraert recently renewed all its IT tools, including the EuroTracs Transport Management System (TMS), a Warehouse Management System (WMS), Business Central as a new accounting package and a new customer portal. Salesforce was implemented in early 2023.
Partnering with UPEO for seamless integration
Gheeraert approached UPEO with a double challenge. On the one hand, the transportation company wanted to centralise its customer data to make it easier to work with the same data throughout the different applications. Before the introduction of the CRM system, data had to be entered into each application individually, a process that was labor intensive and error-prone. Besides that, Gheeraert was looking to automate its manual sales process. Through acquisitions, the number of customers had doubled, requiring more effort to make quotes, renew contracts… And with its current growth strategy, this activity will only grow.
Gheeraert has moved from being a pure-play ‘trucking’ company that drives customers’ trailers from one place to another to a distribution company that takes on loads for several customers at a time and performs many stops. This has changed the nature of their relationship with their customers, and the number of interactions with these customers.
The initial scope of the project that Gheeraert awarded to UPEO was fairly limited, automating the internal sales processes and connecting the sales contacts in Salesforce with the other applications, but already with an eye on allowing for future growth and expansion.
Implementing a robust CRM solution
A series of brainstorming sessions helped UPEO understand Gheeraert’s business processes and formed the basis for a concrete action plan that detailed the different phases and the roles and responsibilities. “There was very transparent and frequent communication between us and UPEO, which ensured that the project could move quickly,” says Els Moens, CTO at Gheeraert. As a Salesforce expert, UPEO was responsible for any development and the parametrisation of the CMS to the needs of Gheeraert. UPEO also took the lead in communicating with the suppliers of other applications that Salesforce needed to interact with. Els Moens acted as the key user at the company and worked with the other stakeholders inside Gheeraert.
After three months of development, the project went into production. “From that moment onward, we were able to create new customers in Salesforce and link these customer profiles to the other systems in our application landscape, thanks to the integrations that UPEO wrote between Salesforce and these applications. This means that Salesforce is now in the lead when it comes to customer management.
We used to have business data all over the place: in notebooks, on hard disks, Google Drives,…. Now we have all data centralised and accessible to the people who need that data to do their job.” Els Moens explains how the flow currently works: “As soon as a customer enters a request on our website, this request is automatically entered as a lead in Salesforce. If the lead is validated, a quote is then sent to the customer from Salesforce.” UPEO also built a template that internal sales can use to ask for extra specifications on the cargo. The answers to these questions are automatically added in Salesforce to make completing the quote easier. As soon as the customer approves the quote, the order is sent to Customer Services that approves the order in the customer portal, allowing for the concrete planning of the shipment. Part of the process is also a credit check, where Gheeraert uses the Trends Top product that UPEO developed.
“Every project has its ups and downs,” said Els Moens. “But thanks to the exceptional commitment of the UPEO people we worked with, all challenges were quickly resolved. They are always very flexible to ensure that any problem gets fixed immediately.” UPEO also had a hand in end-user training, as moving from a manual process to a software-driven process presented a steep learning curve for the end-users. By transferring knowledge from UPEO to Gheeraert, the team is now also able to make certain changes themselves, while UPEO focuses on adding extra functionality and modules.
Future growth and enhanced efficiency
As a next phase in the relationship with UPEO, Gheeraert is planning to intensify its use of Salesforce in its go-to-market strategy, managing the entire sales funnel, including reporting and dashboarding. “That will allow us to understand what results we get from our sales and marketing efforts, become data-driven and improve our efficiency in selling,” said Els Moens.
Gheeraert’s partnership with UPEO has been highly successful. “They truly understood our business and delivered tailored solutions with great flexibility and deep Salesforce expertise,” Peter Gheeraert concluded. The strong chemistry between the two companies has laid a solid foundation for ongoing collaboration and future growth.
More info on Gheeraert on their website.
