COWI is a global consulting company providing engineering and advisory services across diverse sectors, including infrastructure, energy, environment, and urban development. With a history dating back to 1930, the company has grown into a team of over 7,000 professionals working on projects in over 100 countries.

Locations: Scandinavia, UK, North America, and India

Overcoming the Complexities of Large-Scale Business Operations

COWI, a leading global engineering consulting firm, faced significant challenges in managing its large-scale business operations. With a vast network of clients and sales representatives, the company needed a powerful and flexible CRM solution to streamline its sales processes and enhance customer management capabilities.

The legacy CRM software that COWI had been using lacked integration capabilities and offered limited functionality. Moreover, the system's cumbersome interface made it difficult for sales reps to manage customer data and sales activities effectively. The inadequate analytics capabilities of the system further hindered the ability to deliver personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, leading to missed opportunities.

To overcome these challenges, COWI recognized the need for a modern enterprise CRM solution to provide a comprehensive view of its customers and sales operations.

Major Concern

Senior COWI Executives expressed concern around how to effectively migrate a significant database to a new CRM. This was a major consideration for COWI, as they relied heavily on this data to manage their sales processes and track customer interactions. They were hesitant about the potential disruption to their existing workflows and the risk of losing important data during migration.

Solution

In 2020, Polar Strategy engaged COWI leadership to conduct a working group with key stakeholders. After analyzing COWI's challenges and identifying opportunities for improvement, Polar Strategy recommended implementing SugarCRM, a next-generation CRM solution. The project timeline was set for 3-4 months, with the primary goal of streamlining sales processes.

SugarCRM offered enhanced capabilities as compared to their previous system, such as being highly configurable and cloud-based, allowing their sales reps to easily access their data from job sites around the world. 

SugarCRM Implementation

Polar Strategy worked closely with COWI to ensure a smooth implementation of the SugarCRM platform. A key component of the implementation was focused around data migration. Polar Strategy architected a data migration solution leveraging SugarCRM’s open API to ingest data from the legacy system into a staging account that would allow for data quality workflows and checks to be run before pushing verified data to the configured SugarCRM objects as records. 

Integrations 

After ensuring that all customer and contact information was transferred accurately and securely, Polar configured integrations with other systems, such as email and calendar applications, to streamline workflows and ensure that all data was up-to-date and synchronized. It was imperative that any tasks and events being added into SugarCRM would appear seamlessly on a users corporate calendar. 

SugarCRM Mobile App

To further enhance the sales velocity of COWI, Polar implemented the SugarCRM mobile app. This was necessary as COWI's sales team was often on-the-go, meeting with clients, and working remotely. The mobile app enabled COWI users to access and update customer information, manage their schedules, and collaborate with team members from anywhere, at any time.

Creating Opportunities

Polar set up a streamlined process for creating and managing North America opportunities in SugarCRM. After identifying the key stages of the sales process, Polar customized the SugarCRM platform to reflect these stages and enable workflows for automated notifications and task assignments. This enabled COWI's sales team to track the progress of each opportunity easily and to move it through the various stages of the sales pipeline as required.

Training and User Adoption

The majority of CRM implementations fail due to poor adoption. To solve this problem and to enable their clients to successfully deliver an enterprise CRM within the organization, Polar Strategy has developed a tailored Training & Adoption plan that it has successfully deployed over the years.  The key to a successful implementation that is adopted within the organization is to identify champions within each department early who can support the implementation process and identify key features that will provide value to their respective departments. Polar identifies these individuals, establishes a working relationship, and converts the key features into measurable results for the executives, such as KPIs and efficiencies gained. 

Results

The implementation of SugarCRM and the SugarCRM mobile app had a significant impact on COWI's sales velocity. By streamlining its sales processes and enabling its sales team to work more efficiently, the organization was able to:

• Increase Sales Pipeline with fewer clicks. 
• Enhance Collaboration with other COWI members, specifically when bidding on complex opportunities.
• Sales reps leveraged the mobile app to easily update open bids and projects by uploading pictures and files from the field. 
• Obtain a Customer360 view for COWI customers and prospects, enhancing the win rate for opportunities being developed for existing vs. new customers. 

Today, COWI has a strong presence in Europe, North America, and the Middle East and operates in a wide range of industries, including transportation, energy, environment, water, and buildings. The company's expertise and innovative solutions have earned them a reputation as a trusted partner for clients worldwide.

Customer Quote

“Polar Strategy delivered and implemented an Enterprise CRM solution for COWI, migrating the entire sales organization from a legacy application. Polar provided analysis, solution design, deployment, training, and support. Polar successfully met a very aggressive implementation timeline.”

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Kristine Majlath
Associate Director

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