Case Study｜Soei Co.

Our strength lies in proposals that combine cleaning agents and cleaning equipment to improve safety while maintaining cleaning power.

- What is the nature of your business?

Yamada:
Soei Corporation is a company that sells cleaning supplies, sanitation products, and building maintenance products to cleaning companies. In addition to handling products from other companies, the company is currently focusing on the development of its own original products, and is meeting the needs of cleaners by not only selling products but also offering proposals that include cleaning methods.

Our goal is to contribute to the local community through "cleaning," "beauty," and "hygiene. We are dedicated to our daily corporate activities so that we can help cleaning companies and at the same time create a comfortable space for the end users of buildings.

— What are the strengths of your company compared to other companies in your industry?

Yamada:
We believe that our greatest strength lies in selecting products that cleaners can use with peace of mind. There are many chemicals used by cleaners that are highly effective but also have an impact on the human body and require caution in their use. We believe that the reason why many companies choose us is that we do not provide such highly hazardous chemicals as much as possible and offer proposals that combine them with cleaning equipment to maintain their cleaning power.

For this proposal, we are always looking for new cleaning methods. We listen to the apparent needs and continue to search for solutions. At the same time, we actively uncover latent needs and do not neglect to prepare for needs that may arise in the future.

— What efforts are you making to uncover potential needs?

Yamada:
We place great importance on face-to-face sales meetings. In business negotiations conducted by e-mail or telephone, communication tends to be limited to the necessary information. This is not the way to uncover latent needs. We value this attitude of building a relationship of trust with our customers by meeting them face to face many times.

For this reason, we tell our sales representatives that we want them to make frequent visits to vendors. We believe that sales activities that are efficient and spend as little travel time as possible are important for this purpose.

Realize efficient sales activities by linking negotiation history and location information

— Please tell us about the challenges your company was facing before the introduction of UPWARD.

Mr. Yamada:
We were facing a big problem with the daily reports that each sales representative had to fill out to report the daily sales status. In addition, it was difficult to look back on the history of the written daily reports, and they were not utilized in subsequent sales activities.

In response to this situation, we started to create a system that allows the history of daily reports to be traced back, using the daily report management function in our core system. However, because the system was not designed specifically for daily report management, it resulted in increased labor and a large difference in whether or not daily reports were input by employees.

Hara:
The system at the time did not upload daily reports properly in environments with slow Internet connection speeds. There were cases where daily reports were written while out of the office but not submitted because of this.

Another problem was that even though the daily report itself could be traced back, it could not be displayed for each business partner. This meant that when the person in charge changed due to resignation or other reasons, it was time-consuming to check the business meeting history. As a countermeasure, we had been telling the employees to share important information by e-mail for some time, but only a few of them voluntarily did so, perhaps out of embarrassment.

Yamada:
For these reasons, I began to think that I wanted to introduce a system dedicated to daily report management that would allow hassle-free input and display the history for each business partner. It was during this time that I saw UPWARD at a trade show.

— There are other daily report management systems, but what do you feel are some of UPWARD's unique advantages?

Mr. Yamada:
I found it very useful to be able to link business meeting history and location information. For someone like our sales representative, who visits many business partners on a daily basis, the sales flow line is extremely important. For this reason, it is essential to understand the location of each business partner. However, there were very few sales representatives who focused on this area.

However, UPWARD automatically registers the location of business meetings and can display this information on a map. We thought that this function would allow us to naturally grasp the location of each business partner and increase the number of employees who would act with an efficient flow line in mind.

— How was our support from the decision to install UPWARD to the actual operation?

Mr. Hara:
Even though we can envision an ideal operation method in our minds, we are unable to incorporate it into our system. In contrast, UPWARD's staff carefully listened to what we envisioned in our operation method and tuned the system to meet our needs. I feel that it is because of that support that we are now able to smoothly operate the system.

Each employee's high awareness of information sharing promotes the use of UPWARD.

— What is the current use of UPWARD?

Yamada:
Daily business meeting history is stored as a daily report. Since the daily reports stored by each employee can be checked on UPWARD, many employees are using the system to seek hints for proposals. We have heard that UPWARD is particularly effective in making proposals to companies that have branch offices in various regions. For example, a proposal that was effective at the Osaka branch of the same company is often also effective at the Kyushu branch, and UPWARD enables them to grasp the details of business negotiations conducted at other branches and reflect them in their own proposals. This seems to be very useful.

— Before the introduction, were there any opportunities for information exchange between branch offices?

Yamada:
We had sales meetings on a regular basis, so branch managers would exchange information with each other at those meetings. However, information was not exchanged between the sales meetings, so I think it lacked a sense of speed.

— The introduction of UPWARD has brought a sense of speed to the sharing of information.

Mr. Hara:
Yes. I feel that this speed has also increased the accuracy of information at the same time. Whenever inaccurate business meeting information is entered, the person in charge can immediately check the details and make a note of it. This has reduced the number of cases where important information is missing from the negotiation history.

Yamada:
I also feel that more employees are voluntarily entering their business meeting history compared to before the introduction of UPWARD. It seems to be largely due to the fact that they can use appon their smart phones to respond to the requests in their spare time when they are out of the office. In addition, for our salespeople, who make many visits to the office, it is also nice to be able to enter information between meetings, because if they try to enter it all at once at the end of the day, they will forget what they have done.

Mr. Hara:
I am very happy that I can add to what I have entered once and then add to it later. When I am busy, I can enter just keywords before forgetting them, and then take my time to write down the details.

— Is there anything you can do to encourage people to fill out the business meeting history?

Yamada:
I have not done anything in particular. Still, I think it is thanks to the company culture that a lot of business meeting histories are entered. The company has always had a high level of communication among employees, and each sales representative has a high awareness of information sharing. I believe this is reflected in the form of daily reports.

If I had to pick a strong innovation, it would be Hara's use of "Likes" in Chatter (a social networking and business chat tool for companies provided by Salesforce). He "Likes" conversations that come up on Chatter frequently and immediately. Thanks to this, I think the number of employees who say, "If I use UPWARD, I can get "Likes," so I'll use it," is increasing.

Mr. Hara:
Just as we tend to look at social networking sites after work hours, we tend to look at UPWARD during work hours. We are actively utilizing the system in order to encourage such a habit. As a result, we want to create a situation where each employee is always aware of the latest information within the company.

— Have there been any changes within the company as a result of using Chatter?

Mr. Hara:
It has become easier to point out mistakes. With Chatter, I can point out mistakes without making any offence, which is very helpful.

I want to keep evolving with this in mind.

— What is the direction that Soei Corporation would like to take in the future?

Yamada:
As for the company as a whole, we would like to expand our services to address the labor shortage in the cleaning industry. To this end, we would like to focus on developing and providing cleaning technologies that utilize AI and robots. In addition, many cleaning tasks still involve hazardous work, so we would like to develop and propose cleaning methods that are safer and maintain a high level of workmanship.

— We would also like to ask if you have any thoughts on further utilization of UPWARD.

Yamada:
We would like to centralize scattered business meeting information, including past history. As a result, we would like to reduce the time spent on information sharing, including sales meetings, and shorten working hours to create a better working environment for employees.

Mr. Hara:
We would like to further enhance customer information. Since it is possible to link business card data to company information, we would like to make it possible to check all the information on each company's employees, departments, contact information, etc. on UPWARD at once. As a result, we hope that each employee will be able to check UPWARD prior to a business meeting, so that he or she can go to the meeting with the information in mind.

In addition, we would like to establish a forum for receiving suggestions from within the company on how to utilize UPWARD. We feel that UPWARD still has many useful functions, but we are not fully utilizing them. We would like to hold study sessions to solicit suggestions on how to utilize UPWARD, and in consultation with UPWARD, we would like to create an environment that will enable even more effective use of UPWARD.

— Your company has achieved digitalization of negotiation history by introducing UPWARD.

Mr. Yamada:
We are in the process of making plans right now, and with the introduction of UPWARD, all of our employees have a deep understanding of the benefits of digital transformation. We are now making adjustments with a view to establishing a dedicated department for accounting and order taking . Currently, we are making adjustments with a view to converting our accounting and order entry operations to digital transformationand establishing a specialized department for these operations.

If we fail to introduce new technologies, we will lose the competition and our employees will leave us. A company that does not change is, in the eyes of society, regressing, and with this in mind, we will continue to conduct our corporate activities.