Nexter: a CRM project with high strategic stakes

About Nexter

Nexter, France’s leader in land defense and Europe’s 3^rd largest ammunition manufacturer, is dedicated to meeting the needs of French and foreign armies.

The Group’s business also extends to supplying systems and ammunition for air and naval forces.

With export orders growing strongly, the Group is pursuing its international development policy, while placing customer services and support at the heart of its offering.

Project background

Looking ahead to 2020, Nexter’s strategic priorities are threefold:

• Become, through the KNDS group, the European leader in the land defense industry
• Increase its international business volume
• Strengthen its position as a strategic supplier to the French Army

None of these goals can be reached without a shared vision of customer relationship management, delivered within each of the group’s business lines by every employee in contact with customers, and without the right tools.

To align these elements, Nexter carried out a strategic review across the Group and its entities.

A Group-wide CRM project

In this context, Nexter decided to rely on Synolia’s expertise to define business-centric requirements and scope its Group CRM project. To support Nexter across the many dimensions of the project, Synolia provided client-side CRM consultants (business analysis and project ownership).

The Group CRM project, led by the group’s Sales Directors, must reflect Nexter’s view of the customer, with a global scope covering the group and the customers of all its entities, in order to:

• Deliver a consistent customer relationship
• Optimize cross-selling opportunities
• Make sales processes more efficient
• Build lasting customer relationships

Operation scoping

The consulting engagement led by Synolia had multiple objectives.

The aim was to:

• Gather the needs of the group’s various business lines and departments
• Define the CRM features and overall approach to meet those needs
• Prioritize those needs to launch a coherent group CRM project in the short term
• Identify technical constraints
• Scope the CRM project through a requirements specification, a provisional schedule, and appropriate project governance.

To co-build the Group CRM project effectively, Synolia set up a series of themed workshops over two months.

The employees involved were contacted ahead of each workshop and encouraged to take an active part: “We explicitly asked everyone concerned to block out time in their calendars so that everyone would be fully available during the workshops,” says Béatrice Desnoux, CRM Manager at Nexter.

On to the comparative study

Nexter then undertook a comparative study of the solutions available on the market, with two major constraints in mind: the first concerned timing, given an ambitious schedule, while the second related to the security of data storage, given how sensitive the data is.

The chosen solution therefore had to support local (on-premise) data hosting rather than the cloud, so that Nexter would keep control over the hosting of its applications.

“The adventure continues”

Following this study, SugarCRM was selected, and the Group CRM project has been rolling out since September 2018.

The teams are very enthusiastic:

“Over the coming months, further sprints will keep fine-tuning the solution, always with an agile approach. We are enriching our tool as requests and feedback come in from our internal users. The adventure continues!” says an enthusiastic Béatrice Desnoux.