Sunny Sanyal

Vice President of Global Marketing, Hyster-Yale

Supernova Award Category: 

Digital Marketing and Sales Effectiveness

The Organization: 

Hyster-Yale Group is a global manufacturer of lift trucks. Spun off from NACCO Industries as an independent public company in 2012, Hyster-Yale produces three brands of forklifts, sold mainly through its worldwide network of independent dealers. Hyster-Yale's global presence, among the largest of all material handling manufacturers, enables it to commit the resources necessary to ensure their lift trucks are some of the most innovative in the industry.

Their telemetry systems optimize materials handling by enabling their customers to know how their trucks and operators are performing, from individual trucks to entire fleets, at all times and in real time.

The Problem: 

Hyster-Yale faced a problem common to other high-growth companies: It struggled to keep up with the needs of its rapidly expanding customer base and distribution network. Plus numerous acquisitions and rapid international expansion came with consequences: The company nearly drowned in a sea of data gathered from disparate processes and systems, ranging from an aging online truck configurator to spreadsheet order forms and home-grown quoting tools. Those systems weren’t integrated, making it nearly impossible for customers to get consistent information and for the company to accurately forecast demand and plan production.

“We had no way of understanding who our customers were, what history they had with us, or how well we’d performed in their industries or regions,” says Sunny Sanyal, vice president of global marketing. While Hyster-Yale’s US office had provided an online configurator, “the rest of the world had to rely on local product specialists who knew exactly which part went with what truck,” Sanyal says.

The Solution: 

With 700 truck models and hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of configured parts, “relying on random individuals to scale our business was ridiculous,” he says. Instead, Hyster-Yale needed one global platform on which to standardize the company’s workflows, create detailed customer profiles, and then share all of that information with its dealers and inside sales teams.

Hyster-Yale traded in its myriad systems for Oracle CPQ Cloud.

The Results: 

“We now have one global platform that tells every user instantly what part goes with what truck,” Sanyal says, noting that any one of the company’s hundreds of dealers will be able to go into the system and configure the right options. Using the search feature in the Oracle CPQ (configure-price-quote) cloud software, dealers will be able to see only those products that are relevant to the brand being quoted or the region in which the product would be used. 

Making it easier to configure products and produce more accurate quotes was essential, but making the quoting process more comprehensive and scalable became a differentiator, Sanyal says. That’s because all of Hyster-Yale’s dealers are independent, free to determine the mix of brands they carry, how many of each model they think they can sell, and what terms they’ll agree to when buying new inventory. 

If reps need to offer discount pricing to a dealer in order to close a sale, they can use the workflow built into Oracle CPQ to manage special pricing requests, Sanyal says. Some regions used to send custom orders via email or phone and then wait for them to be reviewed and approved, he says.

With Oracle CPQ Cloud, “our dealers can now get real-time visibility into the pricing contracts we have with them, the specifications and availability of our products, and the customer purchase histories by region,” Sanyal says.

Metrics: 

Since Hyster-Yale went live in early 2017 with its new sales and order management platform, it has quoted more than 217,000 product configurations, processed 95,000 orders, and built and shipped 46,000 trucks. “It’s so much easier to measure our performance with all of the data coming through one platform,” Sanyal says. 

The Technology: 

Oracle CPQ Cloud

Disruptive Factor: 

“We’re beginning to get real-time intelligence about customers, their industries, what pipeline stages they’re in, and the kind of trucks those customers have requested quotes for,” Sanyal says. “This will help us improve our forecasting and production planning, while also helping our dealers convert more quotes into more sales.”

Having one global system is also making it easier for Hyster-Yale to launch new products. In the past, the company had to set up specifications for each new product in each target region, a process that could take up to six months, Sanyal says. With the new cloud-based system, he says, Hyster-Yale can launch a product worldwide in less than eight weeks.

Shining Moment: 

NA

About Your Organization

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc., headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, offers a broad array of solutions to meet the specific materials handling needs of customers' applications.  The Company's wholly owned operating subsidiary, Hyster-Yale Group, Inc., designs, engineers, manufactures, sells and services a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts marketed globally.