CreativeHope is a consulting company that specializes in supporting the introduction of HubSpot, a tool that enables the integrated management of marketing and sales activities.
We provide a full range of support from consulting to UI/UX development to help companies succeed in their business with our technology and knowledge.
Improved the order approval process for a major BtoB manufacturer that handles a wide variety of products, building a unique system with HubSpot and Questetra.
Q. What kind of operations do you use Questetra for?
We use this system for order settlement. Our customer, a major manufacturer (hereinafter referred to as “the customer”), is using this service.
Specifically, it is an order approval flow in which a sales representative submits a request for the desired order amount, which is then forwarded to their supervisor and the accounting/administrative department. We have been supporting our clients to build a platform around HubSpot, and Questetra is being used as an order approval system/workflow platform in conjunction with HubSpot.
Q. What challenges did you face with order fulfillment?
The main issues were that there was a lot of analog work and a lack of information/functions necessary for the operation of the order approval flow.
Previously, we were using another company’s order settlement system and HubSpot (SalesHub). However, the two systems were not linked. As a result, PDFs and printing of documents were required for information and task transfer.
In addition, the previous order approval system did not record information such as the background and requirements of the order when it was approved. Therefore, there was no information to reference when verifying the past in order to improve the balance of payments, and verification was not possible.
As for workflow, HubSpot has simple functionality. However, it was not possible to implement a complex flow across departments.
Q. How did you resolve the issue?
The integration between HubSpot and Questetra has automated much of the information and task delivery, eliminating the need for PDFs and printing.
Process information is recorded in Questetra. Therefore, the history of the person in charge’s comments, approval conditions, and other decisions in each process of the order approval flow can be referred to. By exporting this information on a regular basis, it is now possible to verify the order approval process and improve the balance.
In addition, Questetra performs operations according to the workflow diagram that you have created. Therefore, an order approval flow has been realized in which the order is circulated to the parties concerned according to the predefined rules/sequence.
Specifically, we were able to create an order approval flow that corresponds to each application price and product category. In addition, an order approval flow that can be handled not only by the sales department, but also by all related departments, including the accounting and administrative departments, was created.
In addition to these efforts, Questetra has also achieved operational efficiency through a variety of other innovations.
For example, the cost of goods and operating profit against actual application prices are now displayed on the task processing screen. This has reduced errors in judgment by the decision makers. In addition, the administrative department no longer has to investigate this information on their own, which has increased operational efficiency.
Furthermore, the “deadline” function reduces the backlog of circulations. Depending on the approval flow, there may be cases where approval is not required, but it is necessary to circulate the documents to those above a certain position. However, simply circulating the documents would cause a backlog of work until they are approved. Therefore, we were able to handle such cases by using the deadline function to automatically move to the next step after a set amount of time has elapsed.
Q. What would you like to work on in the future?
As well as this case study, we are receiving an increasing number of inquiries from HubSpot users who want to create a quote creation approval flow, or who want flow through administrative procedures after event acceptance, and so on. We would like to use Questetra to meet the needs for such complex workflows in the future.
Questetra can display the calculation results of input values on the screen in real time. In this example, the estimated profit for the approved price is automatically calculated and displayed on the screen. However, complex calculations are imported into Questetra after preprocessing the cost/actual data. In the future, if more complex processing such as SQL can be performed in Questetra, we expect that the range of applicable operations will expand even further.
