Simplifying Supply Chain Planning and Product Feedback

Challenge‍

Bentley was using manual data collection to manage information for their yearly forecasting and product feedback processes. These processes are required to ensure supply chain planning goes smoothly each year and all products comply with medical device regulations. However, due to using outdated and siloed systems, these processes were inefficient and costing Bentley precious time. 

The workflow for product feedback was especially cumbersome. To collect product information from partners, Bentley was using email communications, attachments, Adobe PDF documents, Excel sheets, and paper-based print and scan processes. This caused communication issues, information loss, and massive time inefficiencies. 

Since this process needs to be completed six times every year for compliance purposes, Bentley was spending over 96 hours compiling information and converting data into a format that was usable by their team. It was clear that a new solution was needed to save time and provide a better experience for partners and other stakeholders.‍

Solution‍

To improve their processes, the Bentley team turned to Forms for Salesforce, a native solution on the Salesforce platform that was recommended by Bentley’s Salesforce consulting partner, abilex GmbH. abilex is a German consulting and services company and Formstack partner specializing in digital business transformation for marketing, sales, and services.

With the help of Forms for Salesforce and abilex, Bentley was able to digitize their forecasting process—making it easier to manage their supply chain planning workflows. They also used powerful dynamic prefill and conditional logic capabilities to create online surveys that could quickly collect product information from partners and seamlessly pass data to their Salesforce org. These surveys are automatically pre-filled with data from multiple objects, personalized to each partner, and sent out from Salesforce—creating a better experience and simplifying the data collection process for both the Bentley team and their partners.‍

Outcome‍

Thanks to Forms for Salesforce, Bentley’s supply chain and customer feedback processes can now be completed in minutes versus hours and days. Both processes are now fast, efficient, and traceable. Digitizing and optimizing their workflows has also allowed the Bentley team to maintain a more complete and standardized view of their partners in Salesforce. They can now follow up more consistently and precisely with their partners, and partners can now enjoy a more convenient and professional experience that’s personalized to them and easy to use. Due to these time savings and improvements, Bentley predicts that they will be able to expand their processes to include over 70 partners worldwide across 80 countries.