Discover how Learners helped MTC Solutions.
Introduction
MTC Solutions (formerly MyTiCon) is a Canadian supplier of large-scale timber construction projects across North America. The company has over 10 years of experience and provides a wide range of structural hardware for mass timber construction, such as fasteners, beam hangers, connectors, and rigging devices. That helps its clients construct code-compliant buildings such as offices, malls, and condos.
Challenges
MTC Solutions uses SAP Business One (B1) as its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and HubSpot as its sales, marketing, support, and reporting platform. The company wanted to integrate these systems. They wanted to combine Orders, Quotes, Invoices, and other transactional and customer data in SAP B1 with CRM data in HubSpot. This could then allow better data visibility and insights.
Some of the challenges MTC Solutions experienced before Learners.ai improved data management and revenue operations:
- The contracted third-party company provided a custom HubSpot to SAP integration solution and did not provide control of the integration.
- The inability to control the integration, as business needs changed, created inaccurate data, operational challenges. This originated the need for manual data manipulation, resulting in data becoming siloed in SAP and impacting financial performance and productivity.
- Unable to fully utilise their HubSpot software. This meant they couldn't scale their sales operation or enrich customer information, quote, orders, delivery and invoice pipelines. The team wanted to save time and positively impact the organisational performance while optimizing their data warehouse. They wanted to know how to improve data visibility by having SAP as the single source for operational data within HubSpot.
- Failed integration potentially due to SAP operating as an on-premise system protected by the corporate firewall. This made it harder to exchange data between SAP and HubSpot in a secure manner. This barrier affected their sales, marketing and customer success goals.
MTC Solutions required a company with extensive experience in HubSpot integrations that could blend data from both systems. They wanted improved visibility throughout the sales pipeline, but also understood the technical intricacies involved when it comes to Security and Compliance.
Learners.ai was asked to tackle and solve the above challenges.
Solutions
Learners wanted to integrate SAP with HubSpot according to MTC Solutions’ best practices by working in collaboration with the project stakeholder (The ERP & CRM System Admin). So MTC Solutions could reach its data integration goals.
Some of the ways Learners solved MTC's challenges.
HubSpot as the "Hub" of MTC Solutions
Learners created project pipelines in HubSpot that aggregated relevant data from SAP to HubSpot. This was to provide MTC Solutions with a centralised location to view this data alongside marketing and sales analytics. Relevant data included quote information for construction companies that would require MTC Solutions for large-scale construction projects, such as recreation centres, large commercial/residential buildings, Industrial complexes, etc.
The creation of seamless data streams between SAP and HubSpot, allows MTC Solutions to view the key information correctly. Team members would no longer have to switch between two different systems or spend time trying to piece together information. Instead enabling the team to use HubSpot to add context to the sales data through HubSpot and its various integrations.
Learners' data integration project would allow MTC Solutions to fully leverage HubSpot by creating an omnichannel data view with accurate information about customers, orders, quotes, and all their activities in the right place at the right time.
Integrating platforms such as SAP and HubSpot may be daunting, however, an experienced engineering team that understands the integration capabilities of both platforms, as well as how they can support different use cases(in this case, SAP B1’s standard Integration Framework) was more than sufficient to do the trick.
Custom Objects
The Learners team created five different objects to align the data models between the two platforms, instead of pushing all data into one object. That enables SAP Orders data feeds directly to its own custom object, SAP Quotes went into their own object, and so on. Doing this allowed MTC Solutions to manage data syncs more efficiently. Learners’ also shifted the existing track projects in HubSpot into their own objects, enabling the sales team to move upcoming project opportunities between stages easily.
Improved visibility
Our team created a solution that provided MTC Solutions with more visibility into all the records linked with prospects and customers. Example: the company could view one order with 10 quotes and multiple invoices in one Company or Deal record rather than accessing each delivery and invoice separately.
Associations with Operations Hub
When multiple objects are involved, associations are always a huge challenge. Learners applied association logic to enforce the referential integrity between all the objects using Operations Hub. This would in turn allow MTC Solutions to define complex relationships between data elements and automate more workflows to streamline operations and reporting further.
Reconciliation tool
Since data consistency was a huge challenge, Learners’ also developed a small app to perform historical data syncs and reconcile data between two platforms to ensure there is always 100% alignment. It was created as a utility to support non-technical users to easily upload and fetch files to and from HubSpot. Historical syncs can now be done in as little as one minute with a few clicks!
Benefits
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Learners created an architecture within MTC's own secured network using standard components and best practices from both SAP and HubSpot. More importantly, the Learners team was able to customise the entire SAP to HubSpot Integration solution to MTC Solutions’ unique business requirements, allowing the company to truly get the best of both platforms while optimising its sales and data operations.
The main benefit of this data integration project was how the end users were quickly able to adopt the new architecture with our support, eliminating the need for MTC Solutions to change its existing business processes. There was no steep learning curve or lots of downtime that affected the end users, and MTC Solutions continued to complete day-to-day operations without creating new workflows themselves.
As a matter of fact, the solution solved a huge bottleneck that introduced more efficiencies. Most important of all is the feedback that we were hoping for from our key stakeholder, Howard So, MTC Solutions’ CRM & ERP Systems Administrator: “The data is flowing in…No manual adjustments are needed… The team is happy with deployment!”.
Some of the other benefits of this data integration project include the following:
- Improved user experience and satisfaction
- Increased efficiency
- Reduction in data quality errors and operational complexity
Results
After bringing Learners into the mix, MTC Solutions reduced operational errors by at least 50%. This data integration project also improves reporting and analytics, providing the company with a single source of truth for operational data.
That's not all. The new app Learners created for MTC reduces time and cost and adds revenue because non-technical team members can now perform data tasks.
MTC is more than happy with its new integration. Life is easier for team members who can benefit from having a single source of truth linked to HubSpot and saving time from switching between two systems for the information they require, as well as opening opportunities to enhance their data with HubSpot serving as the “Hub” of the company.
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