Krones saves 30% of time in the office thanks to Resco Inspections+ & Salesforce

About Krones

Krones AG is an international market leader in bottling and packaging technology, offering entire lines for the beverage industry and liquid food producers – including process and filling technology, packaging machines, and all the way to logistics and digitalization solutions.

Digital transformation is crucial for Krones to ensure sustainable development and satisfied customers. To provide the quickest possible service to customers, the company employees more than 2,000 field technicians in almost 50 countries all over the world.

This is one of the reasons, digital data play a major role at Krones – so that the office has an up-to-date overview of what is happening on sites.

Challenge: One system, one process, one UI -> One experience

An international corporation needs to have a central overview on business without losing the ability to operate globally. At first, having a 360° overview of all the activities of 2,000 field technicians around the globe, was very difficult. Many of them were still using pen and paper. And some were running third-party solutions that were not aligned on a global level.

Our goal was to unify the processes globally. Hence, we built the system landscape that we called ‘One system, one process, one UI -> One experience’. Also, due to planned migration of the service solution from SAP ECM to S/4 HANA – we believed it was inevitable to look for a standard and proven “one experience” platform that would be used in all 50 Krones subsidiaries. This is when we decided to move to the Salesforce Field Service Lightning (FSL) solution.* Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

Solution: Proven cloud platform for global usage

During the Salesforce FSL implementation, the Salesforce Field Service team was holding onboarding workshops for Krones employees. One of the workshops brought up an interesting topic.

Step 1: Salesforce recommends Resco

At the workshop with Salesforce, we learned that Salesforce FSL, as great and robust as it is, it does not support offline-working Windows devices and can’t deliver offline capability to the extent that we were looking for. All of our users are equipped with Windows laptops and often work in places with limited or no access to Internet the whole day. The Field Service team immediately suggested that its ISV partner, Resco, could fill the gap and cover these two major needs. After a quick call with Resco, both teams worked intensively on a demo scheduled for the next morning. We were surprised how fast Resco‘s team could add Krones‘ requirements to their out-of-the box app. Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

Step 2: Adding the “Krones flavor” to Resco

Resco was the solution for our problem right from the start. Now we‘re talking about the possibilites it gives us. Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

Once Krones rolled out Resco Inspections+ integrated with Salesforce to its users, they started to further explore the possibilities of the solution. From Questionnaire Designer and Result Viewer that help managers get an overview of field teams, to advanced field service & inspection features of the mobile app.

Today, we are using standard (account, work order) and custom (complaint) Salesforce objects in the custom UI (custom filters, views and forms) of Resco Inspections+ tailored to our needs. We chose Resco mainly for its support for offline scenarios. For that we find data synchronization options in Resco very helpful – we can use custom sync filters to limit offline data to the relevant information only. We love the mobile reports with e-signatures. Also, report localization and the entire UI allows us to implement Resco with Salesforce for global use. Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

Benefits on top of Windows support & powerful offline engine

Easy integration of new processes, fast communication with Salesforce

Krones teams implemented Resco to have a better overview of what is happening outside the office. Once the field technician enters the site, he opens the Resco app, checks-in, records working times, collects travel expenses, fills out forms, and checks out with a report.

At the beginning, we discussed implementing “travel expense collection” into our process. Our IT coordinator set up a very basic process for it in our sandbox system just for testing purposes. Creating the custom objects in Salesforce and transferring the process to Resco was in fact a question of just 2 hours. And the synchronization is really smooth & fast. Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

30% of time saved at back office thanks to data accuracy & timeliness

Back-office work productivity is constantly improving thanks to Resco and Salesforce due to information being digitally available. Currently they save up to 30% of their time – thanks to the data about the work progress of field technicians being synced to the cloud. Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

Future Plans: Creating reports and checklists without any IT support

Resco Inspections+ will give us additional capabilities without big IT development. For example, a skilled person is able to create reports, checklists etc. without any IT support. With the new code-free Questionnaire designer it is even easier than before. We plan to explore this area much more and are also discussion other use cases besides Field Service. Peter Becher, Head of Organisation, Methods, KPIs, Central Field Service at Krones AG

*Salesforce Field Service is a Salesforce field service solution for onsite job management with real-time collaboration capabilities.

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