GMS Development
The Key to Becoming a Service Champion

2016 witnessed the disappearance of a few highly experienced, specialized Salesforce partners from the market due to takeovers, resulting in noticeable changes on the customer side. “When consultants are constantly changing and new ones are emerging, they need a lengthy familiarization period and often lack customer-specific background knowledge, and years of invaluable experience with the customer’s organizational set-up, business model, and IT processes and systems,” comments Bernhard Hildebrandt, CEO, GMS Development. By continuing to expand their Professional Services and Consulting expertise, GMS Development is filling this gap on the full business range. “We provide advice and support throughout the lifecycle of projects and supply customer-specific Field Service solutions,” adds Hildebrandt. “Our consultants remain with their respective customers, and some of them have been assisting their clients for more than 20 years.”

Built for Salesforce, the firm offers Service1, a complete Field Service Management solution that uses automation to take customer experience to the next level. Service1 provides a field service solution with industry-specific characteristics and sufficient flexibility for the configuration of business-model based processes. “In total, there are more than 120 specific tools, known in the Salesforce world as Custom Objects,” adds Hildebrandt. “The implementation period for Service1 lasts from three to six months and is carried out in three phases. Known as Digitalization and Automation, in phase I, GMS concentrates on deploying the Custom Objects in the best-suited way for their clients. “The main focus here is on scheduling automation, and spare-part replenishment,” states Hildebrandt. In Phase II, the firm broadens its horizon and concentrates on the customer’s entire service environment—examining the possible automation and optimization potential of all interfaces and processes. Called Integration and Optimization, the emphasis of Phase II is on customers and partners of the service organization. The last phase of the implementation, Performance Improvement, focuses on using the existing knowledge and information base in the respective organization to improve quality and services. “This enables us to continually improve the quality and efficiency of our customer’s services for the entire duration of our collaboration,” adds Hildebrandt.

We provide advice and support throughout the lifecycle of projects and supply customer-specific Field Service solutions

In conjunction, GMS’ new tool, Scrum1, provides templates, tools, and methods for the management and support of CRM projects, thereby assuring high efficiency and up-to-the-minute information on all activities and services in current projects. “Our approach of using Service1 with the support of Scrum1 offers our customers the highest level of certainty that their project will be realized within the set time and budget limit. Our success rate of 100 percent in all the projects we have conducted in 30 years speaks for itself,” states Hildebrandt. Additionally, the continuous improvement and development of Service1 is regularly monitored by Salesforce to ensure its compliance with programming, test coverage, and security standards. The reviews and tests carried out by Salesforce are the customer’s guarantee that Service1 fulfills all Salesforce standards and security requirements.

The beginning of 2017 has been particularly successful for GMS as it has opened a new office in China, become a certified ISO 27001 and 9001 vendor, and developed a Companion App for smartphones. Hildebrandt mentions, “One of the outstanding events was the conclusion of a global Sales Agreement with one of the world’s best-known corporations and the accelerated expansion of our business activities in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Furthermore, the firm aims to bring more transparency and continuously updated information with a fast, easy-to-configure KPI monitor in their summer release. “This will enable every individual Field Service organization to define their own important KPIs and monitor them via a Service Cockpit. This allows the relevant information for every management level and automatic early warning alarms—and even escalation processes—to be managed flexibly and easily,” concludes Hildebrandt.