ArtiFlex Partners with Kona to Enable Global Search Function

ArtiFlex Manufacturing is a premier resource for design, tooling, prototyping, automation, past model service, factory assist, and low volume tooling/production solutions. They have six facilities located throughout the Midwest United States as well as partners for tooling in Korea and China. ArtiFlex is vertically integrated, making it possible to provide value from start to finish for customer programs.

Challenge

Before moving to Saleforce ArtiFlex was on a different CRM system, which was specifically catered to their manufacturing group, but didn’t work well for any of the other groups, who instead of using the CRM relied on spreadsheets. When the company moved to Salesforce the CRM became the company-wide tool across all the different business development groups rather than just one group. Ultimately, that was the main reason and goal for ArtiFlex moving to Salesforce.

The challenge, even after moving to Salesforce, was that there was no clear communication for ongoing sales activities as well as no simple way to report back to the executive leadership team.  The previous CRM system, with its limitations, did have a proficient quick search and query capability and also had the ability to search within documents and files that were saved on that server. When they moved to Salesforce they lost that capability. Artiflex was missing the crucial global search function to efficiently search for documents and opportunities.

Role

Kona Search filled in the Salesforce global search function gap.  After installing the Kona Search UI, ArtiFlex was now able to easily get information out of the work product, comb through sales activities, opportunity notes and even files outside Salesforce. Kona gave everyone in the organization, no matter what level, the ability to get the right information in the right context at the right time.

Approach

A custom executive dashboard was developed for Artiflex so they could simply query docs, chatter, call reports, emails and opportunities and have it displayed back to them in an easy to read format.

Results

Kona Search enables ArtiFlex to query Salesforce as a whole, allowing them to take the information out of Salesforce and put it together in the way they need it. Rather than having multiple and redundant conversations, sales reps can now find what they need without having to make multiple search queries and waste time.  Now anyone in the organization can pull all the information they want and be ready to go before talking to prospective customers.

The executive dashboard started as a leadership team solution but because it added so much unanimous value, it was decided that it should be rolled out to the entire user base.  In addition to that the Kona team continues to add new features and functionality.