OREANDA-NEWS. Severstal has streamlined request generation and steel product ordering through a project completed jointly with CROC. The leading steel producer's customers and managers are now able to conduct ERP and CRM operations from mobile devices.

Approximately 70 sales managers and technical support engineers at Severstal are now using a mobile application developed by CROC. Furthermore, 10 of the company's customers have already received tablets with the mobile application installed. Upon implementation of the one-time password authorization, customers will be able to install this mobile service on their own iOS devices.

"Over one thousand enterprises benefit from our products worldwide. Meanwhile, sales efficiency depends largely on a convenient and prompt request generation process. While this used to take a day or even more, it now takes only minutes to generate a purchase request or claim using an iPad or iPhone. In addition, the system allows for the monitoring of order fulfillment duration and stages. We expect that such mobility will help us increase customer loyalty," said Dmitry Maximov, Head of Marketing Department, Severstal Russian Steel.

During the project, an SAP Mobile Platform, comprising MEAP SUP and EMM Afaria, was implemented for mobile device management in order to integrate the customer's systems (particularly, SAP ERP and SAP CRM) with the mobile application and to ensure corporate data security.

"This was a truly integrated project requiring serious changes to be made to the customer's systems architecture, with delimitating staff access to system data, and approximately 20 CROC managers, engineers and programmers being involved," said Oleg Terekhov, Large Account Director, CROC.

"The ability to use the mobile application in both online and offline mode was one of the customer's key requirements. When offline, a user can input or replace data without wasting any time, as all the information will be updated as soon as an Internet connection is available. Also, the implemented tool is compatible with all of the latest iOS versions, with prompt adaptation for Android or Windows being available, should the customer decide to expand the range of devices its employees use," said Konstantin Astakhov, Head of Portal and Mobile Solutions, CROC.

The project will continue making the application compatible with more operating systems.