Duha Group, a 60-year family business in color marketing and manufacturing, uses Salesforce to solve logistics and communication problems across global operations. Chatter gives them a live feed for teams worldwide, while custom objects track orders from purchase to dispatch. They can now build tools in real time during meetings.
I never thought I'd be saying this in my business life. I never thought I'd be telling you that I thought social had a place in business. I just had to open my eyes and pay attention to what some of our younger generation, to my son that said to us, you know, this is important to us. The words are the same, but the platform is different on how we're going to communicate. Okay, guess what? An old dog can learn new tricks.
Duha Group is a color marketing and manufacturing company. We make paint chips, color cards, color brochures, architect kits, the Fandex.
We're a 60 year family run business. We started off in the printing industry and we've kind of moved towards more of a specialization in color matching and specifically color marketing for paint, automotive, cosmetic.
In our industry, the market is consolidating at a very rapid pace, which means we need to engage our customers in a way that makes them want to do business with us.
We spend a lot of time focusing on increasing the efficiency in our manufacturing process. But what we actually found was our bottleneck became our logistics. So how the information was getting from the customer and to the people that needed it and then back to the customer.
We start chatter groups with customers so they have access to everyone they need to have access to in our company, the sales rep, the managing director, people involved in production, they can just log in and access all their files and ask questions to the right people.
Global synchronicity to us means having that same experience, no matter who you call anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day with any one of the Duha Group partner companies to make sure that you are being treated exactly the same way.
My sales team would complain to me on an almost daily basis, oh, I need this information. I can't get this information. So now our team gets this on a daily live basis and share it with our customers as it happens. Saves me a lot of sleep, by the way.
In the past, I was used to waking up to the morning with 50 emails from Asia and from Europe and from Australia. Now I had one chatter feed that I could read that brought me up to speed on the whole organization. It was no more than a week where that became more important to me than my morning newspaper and my morning coffee.
Salesforce has been incredibly easy to deploy within our company. It's so intuitive to build a platform, to build an object, to go ahead and completely redesign your business all around the tools that Salesforce offers. And I think that's one of the biggest benefits we've seen.
I'll work on developing a tool for them end users to use, and I can do it live while they're in the meeting with me. I can just start clicking through and start building the tool. We've used Force.com to create an object called Charters.
Right behind us is what we call our charter Overview. It gives us live daily information to be able to organize and plan our administrative departments.
This tracks the order process after sales. So from the time we get the purchase order to the final dispatch date when we shipped the final product out of our facilities.
The challenges that we face are as big as any multinational company, and we are still a small family company. Salesforce has allowed us to start communicating in ways I never thought was ever going to be possible in my lifetime. It's been an incredibly useful tool to frame that conversation and look out for us in 20 years, because today's just the beginning.
