Victrex manufactures savings, Customer Excellence awards with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

It all started in early 2013 when UK-based Victrex hired James Fleming as Group IT Director and then Barry Andrew as Commercial Director.

In this case, "it" was the company's effort to introduce some sorely needed business insight in a range of areas. Outdated legacy systems were preventing the 55-year old manufacturer of high performance polyketone materials from getting a handle on sales, marketing, and customer service functions.

Now that they've deployed a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, the results have been efficiency gains and operational insights - and now a pair of awards. The company, which works with Dynamcis CRM partner Zero2Ten, is receiving the 2014 Industry Excellence Award for Europe in manufacturing, along with a Business Visionary award for Fleming. Both awards, along with twelve others, will be highlighted this week at Convergence 2014 Europe in Barcelona.

"The issue started with Barry, who looked after their commercial sales organization, trying to get a handle on the sales function, the marketing function, the customer service function, who the good customers were, who the most profitable customer were, the activities that the sales people were doing, what was working, what was not," said Adam Spurr, SVP Worldwide Sales & Marketing at Zero2Ten Inc., the Microsoft partner that worked with Victrex to deploy Dynamics CRM Online.

When Andrews probed Victrex's legacy system for all that crucial business data, he was unable to find much of anything. So he sought out Fleming to ask a very pertinent question: Where is it?

"When I arrived at Victrex I took ...