Customer Story
Chamberlain Group improves internal operations and customer satisfaction with Precisely Automate
50
million homes supported globally
87%
improvement in return processing time
1,500
hours a year roughly saved by the team
Overview
Chamberlain Group, the parent company to LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco, designs and engineers residential garage door openers, commercial door operators, security cameras, and gate entry systems. Their products, including the myQ Garage & Access Control App (myQ app), enable seamless and secure access to homes and businesses, supporting over 50 million homes globally. The myQ app allows users to check the status of their garage and entry doors while providing the ability to open, close, lock, or unlock from anywhere. Chamberlain’s customers trust them to keep their homes safe, and in turn, Chamberlain needs to trust that their internal processes meet the same standard to ensure accuracy, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
Challenge
With over 50 million customers globally, there’s a significant amount of important data to be managed. When the data isn’t managed properly, not only does it impact the quality of that data, but it also leads to inefficiency in business processes. When Jeremy Maxfield, Lead Business Systems Analyst, joined Chamberlain in 2019, he spearheaded the adoption of automation to streamline and optimize their manual data processes, while ensuring those solutions would still be available. The need to automate these business processes were directly related to two business challenges: a manual process for managing returned product goods receipts and inspections, that was too error-prone and time-consuming; and new rebate program expansion. The expansion in the rebate program was scaling from 40 to 1,500 eligible customers, which also required quarterly settlements, annual updates, and renewals without increasing department headcount. What do these challenges have in common? Both require a robust solution that can handle large-scale data loads, automate repetitive tasks, and eliminate manual data entry errors.
Industry
Access Solutions
Overview
- Headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, USA
- Founded in 1954
- 6,300+ employees
Solution
“The results also brought unanticipated customer satisfaction feedback. The solution has exceeded our expectations.”
Jeremy Maxfield Lead Business Systems Analyst
Solution
Chamberlain turned to Precisely Automate to tackle these challenges. Automate Studio is the premier Excel-to-SAP solutions platform that enables business users to automate complex SAP business processes and make mass data changes quickly and easily. Used in combination with Automate Evolve, users can leverage the automation platform to digitize strategic data processes. “We chose Precisely Automate because of its robust capabilities, but also because it’s easy for developers and business users to run scripts,” explained Maxfield. Moreover, the tool facilitates data to be loaded directly into SAP, removing the need for manual data entry, and thus, additional errors. The flexible nature of the tool also helped the team create custom workflows that could be adopted across different departments.
“We take full advantage of Automate Studio and Automate Evolve’s offerings,” explained Maxfield. “We use the queries for when we want real-time information from SAP to help us with our data validations, custom workflows around processes that might require multi-team inputs, and web forms for ease of access to the tool as well as the standard creates and updates that the tool offers.”
Using the tools, Chamberlain built workflows that automated the entire returns process, allowing for real-time data validations and faster documentation. With the rebate management, more custom workflows were built to facilitate the annual creation, quarterly settlement, and ad-hoc adjustments to the rebate agreements. To ensure multi-team collaboration, easy-access web forms were also created.
Outcome
Since implementing Precisely Automate, Chamberlain has achieved significant results. In terms of the new returns process, Chamberlain was able to capture an 87 percent improvement in comparison to how long it would have taken to process the returns manually. Overall, the solution is saving the team roughly 1,500 hours a year while simultaneously giving the team more time to help with other stages of the process, creating even more savings and improvements.
The results also brought unanticipated customer satisfaction feedback, “the solution has exceeded our expectations,” said Maxfield. “Not only are we making our internal processes more efficient, but our Customer Care team has been receiving calls from customers thanking them for getting their returns done so quickly.”
On the rebates side, results have been equally positive. The new workflow form empowers the team to complete accurately and effectively all the annual creates, quarterly settlements, and ad-hoc changes throughout the year. Not only has the team saved, on average, 700 hours a year, but they’ve also accomplished this without adding any additional headcount.
Next Steps
Automate Studio and Automate Evolve have not only met Chamberlain’s needs but have also highlighted the potential of automation in scaling operations without additional labor costs – in fact, it’s optimized their costs. Looking ahead, Chamberlain plans to continue finding ways to leverage automation and governance in order to help the business grow its market share and create more efficiencies throughout the entire company.
Automate Evolve
Be more agile with a flexible, extensible solution architecture