In conversation with Air Liquide: How Infosys helped implement and roll out Salesforce.com
Philippe Van Der Have, VP Sales Support, Europe
Air Liquide
Axel Baumann, Director of Application Management Services, Air Liquide
Transcript
Philippe Van Der Have
VP Sales Support, Europe
Air Liquide
Air Liquide is a world leader in industrial and medical gases and related services. We are operating through more than 130 subsidiaries in 72 countries, In fact, in Europe, we have more than 1 million customers.
One of the recent initiatives that we have built and deployed in Europe is a CRM tool to support deployment of efficient projects that help the sales organization provide better support. It ensures that our sales people are more often on the field spending time with customers in a proactive manner rather than spending time in the office in a reactive manner.
Infosys has been involved basically from day one - in first, setting a pilot in Germany and then based on that first experience, conceptualizing and developing the application and then ensuring the deployment in all our affiliates. So that has been the role of Infosys, and I would say that we have been quite happy with the support of Infosys. Together with our IT department and also the support of Salesforce.com, we met this challenge -we were faced with a lot of different affiliates, with cultural aspects and also business practice that we had to converge.
Infosys differentiators
I would say three - first the capacity to take challenges. The second would be the flexibility, and the third would be your driving force and your capacity to deliver.
Capacity to take the challenge - it was a huge challenge for us to build the tool and to deploy it over all the affiliates in less than 2 years. You had the capacity to follow our requirements in terms of developing and constructing the project in a timely manner.
Flexibility because in fact we have been dealing, as I was saying, with a lot of affiliates. So we had to integrate the cultural aspects. Projects like these, although well-specified in the beginning, always face - throughout the course of the construction - some changes because when we deal with the processes the devil is in the detail. The capacity of Infosys to adapt to our changes, even if they were small, was quite a strong point.
And I would say you are hard working, the people are hard working - the time difference also allowed to work better. While in France, everybody was sleeping, you secured the time, the lead time to develop the project.
I have been exposed, in my career, to India and to other communities, and I know that cultural gap is something which is difficult especially for people who haven't been exposed to it. First, there is the English language. We have Indian people speaking to French people in this different language which is certainly not something that has been helping, but we have been managing that throughout the deployment of the project. The second thing is the fact that Infosys has provided us with someone onsite. It has progressively helped us to bridge the gap between the two cultures, I would say.
After all, the project is about people - after 3 years the people are understanding each other well. People in the project have changed on our team but I have seen that the team has become stronger and stronger. In fact, we celebrated the last deployment with champagne - when we finalized version 2.0. There were Infosys and Air Liquide people, and together it was a single team.
Axel Baumann
Director of Application Management Services
Air Liquide
I found that Infosys people are highly motivated and enthusiastic about their job, and they take the problems that are our problems as their own. So I can say, they are really eager to provide a good solution and help us to resolve a problem.
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