Success Story SYNERTRADE
User Support and Onboarding: How Newired Transformed Synertrade's Performance
-60%
TRAINING EXPENSES
-40%
SUPPORT TICKETS PER MONTH
SynerTrade is a European leading provider of Digital Procurement software, offering solutions and services to optimize purchasing processes Synertrade’s eProcurement Suite – Synertrade Accelerate – offers access to the best of today’s technology: cloud, big data, community and mobility.
Every year, an average of US$ 600B is managed on Synertrade’s eProcurement Suite. This platform is composed by different modules: Supplier Relationship Management, Procure To Pay and Source to Contract. Synertrade is an autonomous division of the €2.5-billion-worthy Econocom group. The vendor’s main motto is, “Innovative Procurement, Now,” and it emphasizes the benefits of its platform single code base.
The Challenge
Although Synertrade’s platform came to optimize many processes, software adoption always brings about some challenges.
The main issue observed on it was related to delivering effective user support and onboarding users in multiple languages.
Although User Manuals are available for all modules of Synertrade’s platform, users usually do not read them – they normally open new support tickets every time they have questions or something is unclear.
Tickets often overload the support team’s capacity, who has no other option than slowing down their performance and consequently the overall speed of its issue resolution.
Synertrade Accelerate is an E-procurement software which covers the entire procurement life-cycle, focusing on five main areas. Source to Contract provides support for Sourcing, Auctions and Contract Management; Procure to Pay handles internal Purchasing and Payment flows; Supplier Management streamlines the relationship management and evaluation with external business partners, while Purchasing Intelligence aggregates all KPIs of the procurement workflow and displays them in easy-to-understand data analytics dashboards. Last, Innovation Management supports the Product Creation Process between a company and its suppliers, from concept to realization.
Normally, the purchasing department of Synetrade’s customers and business partners has an average of 70 internal users connected to the platform, but this number varies considerably from company to company. Synertrade sees a great potential to save time on the purchasing process: currently, the amount of time requested to finish it depends on the business partners’ employees’ skills, combined with their process knowledge. A single supplier qualification process could take 15 minutes to an expert user who owns all the documentation, but even hours if we are talking about an average user.
Sometimes, an end-to-end buying process, which appears to be simple to technical people, turns out to be unexpectedly harder for external users. In the past, the purchasing process was mostly carried out by employees inside a company. Digital Transformation has transformed procurement practices: e-procurement has digitalized some procurement tasks and delegated them to the suppliers directly. The result is that, apart from the internal staff who uses the e-procurement platform, we also have suppliers, who are external to the company, but also need to use Synertrade solutions on a regular basis. If providing internal training and support is challenging in itself, let alone reaching external users.
Synertrade needed a quicker and simpler way to contemplate all the users of its solutions, be they their direct customer or the latter’s supplier. And that is how they found Newired.
The Solution
Newired has been installed on Synertrade Accelerate both on Saas and On-premise, depending on the platform setup and customers’ requirements. The ability to stay flexible and support these two distribution models at once was one of important differentiators which made Synertrade choose Newired. Currently, Newired has been deployed for two of Synertrade’s customers: the most popular tyre manufacturers in the world and one of the most important pharmaceutical companies in the world.
For these customers, Newired instantly improved the onboarding of new and more experienced users, providing multilingual contextual help even on the simplest tasks such as clicking the right button at the right moment. With Newired, the total number of weekly support tickets for Synertrade’s platform was reduced by 40%.
Thanks to Newired, Synertrade Accelerate became easier without changing its own user interface: processes have become quicker, usability has improved and customer satisfaction has consistently been enhanced with no development effort.
Newired has also had an important impact on users’ training: where the hosting application onboarding took an average of 9 days/year per user, it now takes only 60% of that time.
From decision to implementation
The evaluation process of Newired took a few days, and it marked the start of the 2-month implementation process. Our Newired implementation team worked in cooperation with Synertrade teams located in the headquarters (in the USA) and in Europe.
Newired has provided a unique opportunity to offer real time training and allow quick usability fixes for all Synertrade Accelerate users.
Three factors played a key role in their final choice for Newired:
- OEM possibility, a unique partnership possibility offered by Newired to software vendors, where the latter can offer their solutions with in-app guidance built with Newired to their own customers, enjoying special conditions and a flexible pricing model. Synertrade found clear benefits in providing support and training embedded directly into its platform, so that all its customers can take advantage of this guidance with no need for extra plug-ins or tutorials.
- Software versatility: thanks to the versatile structure of Newired, the integration with Synertrade Accelerate has been easy and took little time.
- Stellar support: the target application uses an uncommon technology, still under development; nevertheless, Newired support team has readily responded to specific requests by implementing extra features in the following quarterly release.
Talking about the non-technical factor, flexibility and transparency in Newired’s pricing model also played an important role in the decision to adopt Newired. Synertrade and Newired collaborated to find the best way to distribute and sell the two applications based on an OEM agreement.
Synertrade successfully deployed Newired for multiple customers belonging to different industries. Among the examples, we can name the industries involved: Manufacturing, Finance, Pharmaceutical, TV&Media. As Newired has proven to adapt to different customer application configurations, the roll-outs have been smooth and easy.
After these first rollouts, Synertrade has been very satisfied with its partnership with Newired. Not only did Newired help Synertrade address crucial onboarding and support issues, but it truly added value to Synertrade’s e-procurement platform. Given the success of this initiative, the plan is to introduce Newired to other customers and expand the partnership also in other countries.