WEM's Story: Digitising Construction with Salesforce
Like many of our clients, Western Earthmoving (WEM) first engaged us as their Salesforce Partner to implement Salesforce as a CRM opportunity management. These days they use Salesforce to address all sorts of business challenges.
How it all began
WEM is a family-owned civil engineering business with more than 200 employees across the Sydney basin on the eastcoast of Australia. For 30-odd years, WEM CEO Graham Ragg had been the glue in WEM’s supplier and customer relationships. But the time had come to scale WEM’s success for the future.
When WEM first engaged our team, they were looking for a traditional CRM to help them nurture new business opportunities. Given Salesforce’s reputation as the world’s #1 CRM, it was a great place to start. And that’s where it gets even more interesting…
Phase 1: Salesforce Implementation
What
Sales Cloud implementation
Key Requirements
- Creation and management of the business development function
- Management of the opportunity pipeline
- Management of key stakeholders
- Visibility over the project cycle
- Integration with Tableau (WEM’s reporting system)
Timeframe: 12 weeks implementation
The result: WEM’s entire sales processes and revenue forecasting is now managed across a team in Salesforce. They have a clearer picture of their pipeline of work and the various stages of the sales cycle. By integrating Salesforce with Tableau (WEM’s existing reporting system), WEM now tracks their project revenue against forecasts in real time and over the life of the project.
Working Together
“They’d already proven their expertise in the construction industry and are a trusted advisor to our business.”, Michael Ragg, Director & General Manager, WEM
Phases 2, 3, 4… Operations Management with Salesforce
As anyone in construction knows, when you have an asset you sweat it. So, after the success of Phase 1, WEM’s challenge became: how else can we use Salesforce to digitise our business?
Key requirements
- Digitise site processes and contract management processes
- Digitise safety, audits, quality and plant & equipment maintenance
- Increase effectiveness in sub-contractor management
Our approach
We worked closely with WEM’s transformation manager and executive team to all parts of the business. Team by team, function by function we prioritised a “wish list” of opportunities to digitise processes.
We worked through the priorities sprint-by-sprint using our agile project methodology to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The MVPs were then rolled out and tested with the teams ultimately responsible for using them. This collaborative approach between technology and the business units resulted in high satisfaction and high user adoption.
The result
WEM is now using Salesforce in a range of creative and unexpected ways. Salesforce is not only valued for what it delivers in Head Office. It’s also widely used across operations, including on site. In less than a year, WEM is now using Salesforce for:
- WHS including site inductions, reporting incidents, toolbox meetings
- Managing asset and plant registers as well as plant maintenance triggered by real time data from the plants
- On-site data collection
- Tracking operator licenses and competencies
- Managing concrete booking and subcontractors through Field Service
- Tracking bank guarantees, notices of delays, extension of times, etc.
- Enhancing collaboration with business partners and subocntractors via a portal using Experience Cloud
- And, of course, all the opportunity and pipeline management you’d expect from Salesforce.
What Makes This Project Unique?
You’d be hard pressed to find a construction business like WEM that is this advanced in its digitisation journey. What makes WEM’s story so impressive is the commitment from executives down to embrace digitisation. We’re very proud to be a part of WEM’s journey.