Front line sales processes and tools transformation to meet the requirements of 2020’s business environment

Abstract

This thesis takes a look into Valmet’s sales processes and tools to support those processes. Valmet is a global corporation based in Finland that delivers solutions and equipment to pulp, paper and energy industries around the world. The target of this thesis is to create a develop plan and development topics for new processes and tools for Valmet’s frontline sales. Valmet engaged in new ERP implementation project that has expanded into corporate wide transformation program, called Leap Forward. One crucial part of the Leap Forward scope, is the development of frontline sales processes and tools. The sales process and tools and their nature and development needs create the basis for the empirical part of the thesis. The Leap Forward program is divided into several releases, and the target of the first release is to go live in November 2017 with services business line in Finland. For this part, a work group was established to collect the most critical requirements from frontline sales perspective to be developed and implemented in November 2017. This thesis is a spin-off based on the workgroup’s final report. The result of this thesis is a development plan for Valmet’s frontline sales, what kind of processes and tools they would be implementing in the first releases of the Leap Forward program. The research was done on the job and data was mainly collected from Leap Forward program workshops and subject matter expert meetings. Based on the data, development plan and process and tool mock-ups were created. These mock-ups were iteratively reviewed with subject matter experts and finally approved as basis for development. This thesis also takes a look a bit further into the future, and makes suggestions and ideas for future application landscape and tool functionalities.