Hitachi Consulting Corporation improves 475 sales employees’ productivity; ensures 97% sales forecasting accuracy with cloud-based solution

• Establish a scalable customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platform to help the company sustain rapid expansion through an aggressive multi-year acquisition strategy—including an increase in employees from 450 in the US to 6,500 operating in 25 countries, projects in 50 countries, and annual revenue growth from US$80 million to US$740 million
• Consolidate five existing CRM systems into a single tool to provide executive leadership with a clear picture of the global sales pipeline, a critical forward-looking indicator for the health of the global management consulting and IT services business
• Increase collaboration across multi-national accounts to improve sales team productivity

"As we went through the software selection process, we considered Salesforce.com as well as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We already had two instances of each tool in-house, but both tools presented limitations in the form of additional data costs as well as restrictions on mobility and scalability. On the flip side, Oracle gave us the agility, speed, and insight to quickly deploy the solutions worldwide. We are acquiring companies every couple of months, and those acquisitions bring with them thousands of employees. With Oracle, we can quickly design and configure the applications for those net new users. Standardizing on Oracle Cloud with a global-single-instance foundational cloud platform, we bet big on the Red stack. It has been a good decision. Hitachi Consulting is the only Oracle Diamond Partner with standardized operations on Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud, Oracle Sales Cloud, and Oracle Marketing Cloud."
—David Sheridan, Vice President, Global Oracle CX Practice Leader, Hitachi Consulting Corporation

A successful pilot implementation combined with its in-house expertise and status as an Oracle Diamond Partner and customer propelled Hitachi Consulting to purchase Oracle Sales. With simultaneous projects in flight across the IT organization to replace marketing automation tools and human capital management technology, the company strategically chose to purchase a global single instance.

Hitachi Consulting used an internal implementation team to detail current state analysis of all existing CRM solutions to identify areas of consolidation. The team worked with global stakeholders across multiple teams to successfully merge five legacy systems into a comprehensive design for one global system.

Concurrently, the Hitachi Consulting team partnered with Oracle to successfully replace its existing marketing automation tool with Oracle Marketing. In four weeks, the team made critical best practice decisions to improve lead quality, increased targeting and segmentation capabilities to ensure all campaigns were relevant and cleansed contact data to deliver critical leads to sales teams.

Hitachi Consulting continuously engaged its organization, serving as a liaison across global sales teams, and enabling stakeholders to communicate with one another to improve the overall sales process. By engaging all levels from the sales team to the management team, Hitachi Consulting acquired visibility into every corner of its organization and secured global buy-in for the new standardized processes.

• Standardized on a global cloud-based Oracle technology platform that enables Hitachi Consulting to quickly bring new employees on board through swift application design and configuration capabilities—ultimately supporting rapid company growth
• Deployed Oracle Sales and Oracle Marketing and provided Hitachi Consulting’s global sales professionals, who are frequently in the field, with immediate access to the most up-to-date information on customers and products, including the ability to access the system via mobile devices.
• Enabled sales teams to improve the proficiency and productivity of sales planning, prospecting, and execution to produce better results across the company’s global sales territories
• Expanded territory visibility to drive more effective cross-selling initiatives
• Created more than 250 reports and dashboards to provide sales and executive management with real-time, accurate visibility into the sales pipeline and progress toward corporate goals—driving more timely and effective decisions
• Ensured 97% sales forecasting accuracy and provided predictive analytics for enhanced visibility into upcoming staffing needs three to six months down the road
• Used Oracle Marketing and Oracle Sales to gain timely insight into marketing campaign return on investment and enabled Hitachi Consulting to reference past campaign data to visualize the trends and techniques that help drive increased sales
• Gained the ability to leverage campaign click-through information from prospects to create more personalized and effective marketing programs
• Provided a 60-minute online, self-paced course to quickly and effectively train more than 475 users on Oracle Sales and introduced the group’s new standardized sales process and best practice methodology
• Provided Hitachi Consulting—an Oracle Diamond Partner—with valuable experience that it could share with its customers as they begin to roll out Oracle Cloud applications, including first-hand insight into the workings and advantages of Oracle solutions that delivers added value
• Ensured scalability, affordability, and faster implementation time with the cloud-based solution, with assured high availability for sales teams and low maintenance requirements for internal IT team members—freeing them for other strategic initiatives
• Purchased Oracle Social Network Cloud Service to enable all 6,500 global employees to more effectively collaborate on existing and new projects