Grant Thornton

The Customer 

Grant Thornton is one of the world’s leading organisations of independent assurance, tax and advisory firms. Over 31,000 Grant Thornton people, across 100 countries, are focused on making a difference to clients, colleagues and communities. The firm prides itself on providing quality, personalised service to its clients despite being a dynamic, fast-growing global company. 

The Challenge

With almost 100 autonomous offices in nearly as many countries, Grant Thornton had hit a critical juncture with its existing CRM systems. Some countries had no CRM at all, and those that did had systems that were outdated, inefficient and could no longer support the company’s sales and marketing operational needs. 

Like most companies today, we were being asked to do more with less, and yet our company and clients were continuing to grow at a rapid pace. We had our existing CRM solution for 11 years, but there was no global visibility and no consistency, every country had its own system and processes. We needed a new CRM platform that would give us a standardised footprint for global success and support our high standards for customer service and managing tight relationships.

The company also strives towards global visibility of client contacts and account sales activities, so that account representatives could better leverage relationships on a global level, prevent inefficiency and duplication of sales activities, and exploit competitive situations. 

The Solution

Selecting the right CRM solution was a global initiative. A global committee was created to define a detailed requirements document for system and vendor selection, and after an exhaustive evaluation, Grant Thornton chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM for its power, flexibility, scalability and familiar Microsoft look and feel. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM met all our requirements for a global CRM solution. We are a Microsoft shop, the integration factor of our solution with all our other corporate systems and the same easy look and feel of Microsoft Outlook was very compelling. Some of our countries like using the cloud and others don’t, and Microsoft is able to handle this requirement extremely well.

After selecting Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the platform, Grant Thornton chose Microsoft Dynamics Gold Certified Partner Hitachi Solutions as its system integrator. The global committee not only created the requirements but also developed a CRM blueprint that defined consistent best-practice processes, procedures and terminology, which they call “OneView”, providing each country with a standardised template they could then localise and implement on their own. The solution combined Microsoft Dynamics CRM On-Demand and On-Premise, Hitachi Solutions’ consulting and implementation services, Hitachi Solutions’ LinkedIn connector and Dun & Bradstreet’s D&B360 solution. 

With the global template complete, Hitachi Solutions helped develop a roll-out strategy for the first participating countries, including the US, Canada, Germany, India and Peru, and continues to work with countries as they localise the template to accommodate their specific requirements while still maintaining global visibility and consistency. With OneView, the account planning process is built into CRM, so account managers can see a relationship’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, see where a competitor is servicing the client, and collaboratively plan how best to serve their clients. 

Why Hitachi Solutions

Grant Thornton selected Hitachi Solutions, one of the largest and most experienced Microsoft Dynamics consulting firms in the world, for its global reach and proven ability to handle complex, tier-one displacement projects across many countries. 

Hitachi Solutions had the global reach and experience we preferred. We were confident they could help us build out our initial template system, and help each country move forward with their localizations and implementations.

The Benefits 

• Better visibility and understanding of clients and relationships 
• The ability to do more with less 
• Consistency and efficiency to help meet growth goals 
• The ability to grow while maintaining the close relationships that differentiate the firm 
• More up-to-date information, faster 
• Flexibility and scalability that saved money and resources, with at least 50 percent saved on software implementation and consulting costs by creating a global template, and the search for contact information cut from one to eight hours to less than 15 minutes on average 

In the past, account reps often went to meetings and found out from the client that someone else from GT had just been there, which is embarrassing. Now everyone in the company can easily keep track of sales and client activities. They know who has been to see a client and what was discussed. This allows us to take potentially embarrassing situations and turn them into a relationship-building experience.

What’s Next? 

Grant Thornton is well on its way to having thousands of users spanning dozens of countries, continuing to roll out OneView country by country while maintaining global visibility and consistency. 

The new system is instrumental in helping us maintain a high level of personalized service with our clients while still achieving our aggressive growth goals. We want to double in size within the next five years, and having repeatable and efficient processes and a scalable system, and working with the right global partners, is key to keeping us on track to meet this objective.