The ABL Group is the world’s leading and largest independent provider of marine, engineering, and consultancy services focused on the renewables, maritime and oil and gas sectors.
With a focus on energy and the oceans, the group works to de risk and drive energy transition through three service streams:
– Consultancy and engineering
– Loss prevention
– Loss management
The ABL Group’s team of 1,100 employees is spread globally across 300 locations, 62 offices, and 38 countries, enabling them to deliver swift turnkey solutions to their clients regardless of where their assets may be located.
- With the ABL Group having come to exist following the merger of two similar sized businesses, the company had a disjointed system resulting in a lack of connectivity and integration with respect to operating procedures, reporting, in addition to data and information sharing.
- Limited collaboration amongst employees, business lines, and regional offices hindered the creation of potential synergies (i.e. up-selling, cross-selling, and economies of scale).
- Excessive amount of time allocated to manually performed tasks.
- Need to migrate, integrate, and digitalise years’ worth of data and customer records from multiple companies.
- Need for a system that can grow in unison with the ABL Group and be easily tailored to their requirements without the necessity of extensive reconfiguring or development.
- Design and development of a unified and tailored CRM leveraging Zoho’s sales and marketing suite of products CRM Plus, streamlining data, business lines, revenue streams, and accounts across divisions and regions, while providing a single group-wide view of all contact and business information.
- Creation of a roadmap for the group’s digital transformation through the review and rationalisation of ABL’s operating procedures and implementation of custom automations for complex multi-departmental processes.
- Development of a centralised system that can integrate and retro feed ABL’s enterprise resource planning software NetSuite.
- Training of 220 users, including administrators to ensure the maintenance of the system and its ongoing adaptation to ABL’s needs as the company continues on its growth trajectory.
- Provision of a customised sales pipeline functionality and website integration, allowing the assignment of leads, pipeline quantifying, tracking, and diagnosing, in addition to targeted business development marketing campaigns.
- Migration and integration of legacy data, enabling cross-pollination opportunities between business divisions and a seamless customer experience
By working with Repath Solutions, ABL Group was able to merge and rationalise operating procedures, capitalising on the benefits of being a global integrated group of companies. Repath’s customised approach enabled the creation of a blueprint for ABL’s digital transformation – from customisation, automation, and training – offering an instant view of the whole global business via CRM. By centralising the company’s data, opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell shot up, as did productivity and collaboration. The CRM has also been used to gather details regarding upcoming opportunities, business lines, and revenue streams.
Together, they’ve moved on to the second phase, customising all marketing apps and Zoho Desk. And this is only the beginning. Beyond the second phase of the project, further optimisation is in the pipeline, enhancing adoption and dynamically incorporating new processes, products, and services that derive from upcoming company acquisitions planned by ABL.
Number of Companies for which customer records and data were migrated, purged, and optimized
Number of employees trained by Repath
Months: Time required for completion of phase 1 of design and implementation
- The lack of a centralised CRM across business lines and regions impeded data sharing, the fostering of synergies, and having a global view of the business
- Disjointed and obsolete operating procedures across business divisions and regions resulted in reduced employee efficiency and productivity, and a higher risk of error
- The lack of digitally integrated business development tools for lead tracking, pipeline qualification, and digital marketing occasioned lost revenue opportunities
- Use of Zoho’s sales and marketing suite CRM Plus across business lines; all customer records, data, revenue streams, and accounts collected and purged into the CRM, and access to an array of applications that sync and integrate with one another
- Provision of a single group view of the company’s activities including contact and business information, sales pipelines, and analytics, irrespective of the business division or location
- The centralisation and digitalisation of company data boosted collaboration amongst teams – globally – while opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell increased significantly, as did productivity and collaboration.
- Automations enable synergies and increased operational efficiency. High adoption rate among employees, freed up time from manual data entry, and reduced risk of data errors
- ABL’s website has been fully integrated with the CRM to collect information and assign leads
- Boosted marketing efforts including surveys sent to clients, sales software to provide live and interactive support, and campaigns to inform contacts and stakeholders about upcoming events and news
- Further innovation is planned as Repath helps ABL to continue optimising its system and enhancing adoption
- GRAHAM DALLAS
- Group Business Development & CRM Manager
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