How MedTech can benefit from Salesforce-SAP Integration with Vigience

Manufacturers of medical technology and devices have many use cases, where they can benefit from Salesforce and the Salesforce Health Cloud. In this blog we discuss the most important scenarios and how an SAP-integration can bring this to a whole new level.

Classical CRM/Customer 360 Use Case

Medtech companies can sell in a B2B and B2C fashion. In both cases, a 360-degree view of the customer is required. Salesforce is the ideal platform to create a single pane of glass that contains all relevant information.

Most likely, however, not all information is stored in the Salesforce Sales Cloud alone, but in different other systems. Then a data lake like the Data Cloud can be helpful but data is not guaranteed to be up-to-date or complete. An alternative is the real-time integration into the backend ERP systems such as SAP ECC or S/4HANA, which are used by many manufacturing companies.

Without data from ERP, a customer 360 view is not complete. Transactional data like sales orders, invoices and deliveries are stored there, but also master data like customer information, material data etc.

Vigience Overcast offers several out-of-the-box business processes that bridge the gap between Salesforce and SAP in such a customer 360 use case:

• SAP-integrated Invoice history
• SAP-integrated Delivery history
• SAP-integrated Sales Orders
• SAP-integrated Sales Overview
• SAP-integrated Actual vs. Forecast
• Create Sales Orders in SAP
• Live-pricing and availability check for Opportunities, Quotes and CPQ-Quotes
• Convert opportunities or quotes into SAP Sales Orders
• SAP Variant Configuration (LO-VC) out of Salesforce
• etc.

In addition, Vigience Overcast provides the ability to build-your-own integrations in a point-and-click manner.

Overcast components for Delivery-, Invoice- and Payment History

Customer Service

Especially for Medtech companies, customer service is essential. Imagine a device fails in the middle of an operation and the service hotline is not picking up the phone immediately – worst case scenario!

With a CTI integration like Vonage or others, the service agent sees directly who is calling and gets this account’s information on the screen.

Here it is important to get all the relevant data about their purchases and installed assets, that is most likely in SAP. With Overcast this information can be fetched in real-time, so that it is always up to date.

Asset Management and Field Service

In case an asset at the customer is broken, the field service team might need to go on site to fix the problem or replace it. Salesforce offers advanced possibilities regarding scheduling resources and planning the work. With Overcast, information about the assets (in SAP called functional locations and equipment) can be displayed in the Salesforce Mobile App – characteristics, measurement points and readings, attachments etc.). To plan the onsite visit, it is important to know when the required spare parts will be available and when they can be shipped to the customer or the service technician.

Salesforce Field Service

When a work order is closed and the job was successfully finished, Overcast can trigger the invoicing in SAP directly from Salesforce.

Overcast components for asset characteristics, details and replication

Regulatory Compliance and Quality Control

Medical devices and their manufacturers are heavily regulated. Quality incidents need to be tracked and managed to meet regulatory standards like FDA, ISO etc.

This can be done in Salesforce but requires integration in other systems like SAP so that an end-to-end audit trail can be guaranteed.

In this regard, the management of documents is also important. If this happens in SAP, Overcast can bring the required binaries into Salesforce, independent of their location in SAP (Archive Link, Global Object Services, DMS, etc.).

Analytics and Business Intelligence

Salesforce’s AI-powered analytics platform, Salesforce Einstein, enables Medtech’s to:

• Gain actionable insights into sales performance, customer preferences, and market trends. Part of that information is in SAP and can be fetched by Einstein via Overcast in real-time.
• Use predictive analytics to forecast sales, product demand, and supply chain needs.
• Identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies in sales, production, or service processes. Especially the production planning is done in SAP and needs to be fetched from there.
• Perform customer segmentation analysis to identify high-value accounts and opportunities for cross-selling or upselling.

Supply Chain and Inventory Management

While this is primarily a (SAP) ERP topic, it is important to have supply chain and inventory information available for Salesforce users to allow them to check availability etc. Overcast can help here to display the availability of materials in different warehouses – either has lightning component or within Einstein Copilot.

Improving Customer Experience

Customers in 2024 expect that they can do many things in a self-service manner:

• Create sales orders
• Check the delivery status of a shipment
• Download invoices
• Create cases and quality notifications

Salesforce B2B Commerce and the Community are excellent solutions to enable these use cases. Together with Vigience Overcast it is possible to create a seamless experience that gives the customer everything he needs, whether the process runs in Salesforce or SAP.

… and a lot more

Overcast offers a lot more than what we discussed in this blog post. We have more than 150 business processes and integrations for companies running Salesforce and SAP. Our integrations leverage MuleSoft and we can integrate any non-SAP system via one of the many MuleSoft connectors.

Overcast is Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder-ready and all our integrations work out-of-the-box as Copilot Actions.

Customer Success Stories

Cutera

Cutera is a leading provider of laser and energy-based aesthetics and dermatology solutions for practitioners worldwide. They offer a wide range of industry-leading aesthetic solutions, from hair removal and body sculpting to women’s wellness.

Thanks to the implementation of Salesforce and Vigience Overcast, Cutera business users and field service technicians have integrated access to all the information required to perform their daily tasks without duplicate entry or system switching, and Overcast ensures that the appropriate data is available in the right system at the right time. ​

Guy Thier​, Chief Information Officer at Cutera: “We looked at a number of integration alternatives between Salesforce and SAP and all but Vigience consisted of heavy implementation costs and long timelines. Vigience plug and play integration accelerated our implementation timeline by months and drastically reduced integration costs. I highly recommend Vigience for Salesforce and SAP integration due to ease of use, ease of implementation and tested end points.“

You can learn more about this success story here

Hitachi High Tech

Another good example is Hitachi High-Tech, the leading supplier of medical and bioanalytical equipment and more. It is a rare company that combines the functions of both a manufacturer and a trading company to respond to all customer needs by leveraging its advanced product line-up and solutions.

Overcast enabled the users to register SAP sales orders from the Salesforce user interface. This improved the operational efficiency by eliminating the need for double entry.

Naoaki Yoshida, Head of Business DX, Digital Promotion: “Vigience Overcast allowed us to realize an API-based integration architecture, which was a key factor in implementing our business and IT strategies. Vigience Overcast convinced us with its high affinity with SAP and its scalability.”

Conclusion

The combination of Salesforce and Vigience Overcast can improve business processes at Medtech companies and make them more productive. If you want to learn more about Overcast, please schedule a meeting and demo with us.