Trinseo, a global chemical materials solutions provider and manufacturer of plastic, latex binders, and synthetic rubber, is known for their innovative, sustainable solutions. In order to streamline internal pricing controls, Trinseo required synchronization between their key pricing and master data through a Salesforce and SAP ERP system integration.
Previously, key pricing data and master data required manual updating in two places: SAP ERP and Salesforce. This was a very time-consuming process that led to redundant efforts from multiple functions and – at times – costly mistakes. Since pricing directly ties into key Sarbenes-Oxley (SOX) controls, Trinseo was having to reallocate a lot of resources across many functions to reconcile pricing discrepancies between the two systems. Hours were spent manually uploading, downloading, and formatting documents to ensure accurate presentation of the data in both places to satisfy SOX controls. In addition to this pricing struggle, the Customer Master Data in their SAP ERP did not always match Salesforce. This led to a weeks’ long reconciliation report done yearly to ensure both systems displayed accurate customer information.
What's more, once an account manager would input pricing into Salesforce, they would have to wait for someone to approve it to trigger a sync into their SAP ERP. This left customers waiting – sometimes for days – to place orders. If a customer called in to place an order, customer service would have to place the order on hold and reach out to the account manager to confirm pricing accuracy if it was not loaded into SAP. This clearly disrupted the customer buying journey and held up invaluable orders. To enable operating in an efficient and timely manner, it seemed integrating the two systems was the best solution.
