BACKCustomer Story: Flowonix transforms processes with Salesforce automations and integrations
Company Name: Flowonix Medical Inc.
Sponsor: CEO
Products: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Conga Composer, Conga Sign, CopperHill AIR Connector, CopperHill Flextime Support
Project Goals: Successful Salesforce implementation. Integrate Salesforce and NAV. Streamline and simplify the onboarding and approval processes. Establish custom pricing. Automate patient and inventory tracking. Enable salespeople in the field.
Flowonix Medical Inc. seeks to relieve its patients from chronic pain through an implantable pump that delivers medication. It manufactures and sells these devices to hospitals and physicians. Because of the critical health implications of its business, Flowonix needs to have complete transparency and knowledge of where its devices are at all times. This includes when they are in an inventory warehouse, traveling with a salesperson for meetings, or implanted into a patient.
Flowonix knew the Salesforce UI would be perfect for Sales and Service: it is intuitive, mobile, and highly customizable. But in order to make the most of the investment, they needed it connected to their ERP – Microsoft NAV.
Implementation: Take Two
Flowonix was eager to use Salesforce. However, it was forced to dismiss its original implementation partner after failed efforts to integrate NAV. After several discussions, they replaced that partner with CopperHill Consulting. Flowonix felt confident this change would result in a successful project.
CopperHill kicked off detailed discovery and requirements gathering sessions. The team outlined the best way to configure and customize Salesforce with NAV integration to meet Flowonix’s goals and needs:
1. Integrate Salesforce and NAV
2. Simplify approval processes
3. Establish custom pricing per customer
4. Automate inventory tracking
5. Enable salespeople in the field, while enforcing key processes
Essential Integration between Salesforce and NAV
Flowonix’s number one priority in kicking off this project was to ensure a seamless, bidirectional data sync between Salesforce and NAV. This integration ensures accuracy with Flowonix’s inventory tracking, custom pricing models, products and services available to customers, correct patient and billing information, and order statuses. It also provides the essential status and approval updates to sales teams as orders work their way through the stages of Flowonix’s complex sales cycle. 
CopperHill’s middleware tool called AIR Connector met all of Flowonix’s requirements. It is a lean tool built on the AWS Platform known for its reliability, scalability, and security.
Using AIR Connector to power the integration with NAV enables Flowonix to scale and add more points of integration without compromising the performance or speed of Salesforce or NAV.
A Complex Account Onboarding Process
Flowonix sells its device to doctors, hospitals, and healthcare providers, though the end-user of the product is the patient. Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities needed significant configuration to fit Flowonix’s complex business model and to accommodate the different types of objects and activities that should be associated with patients, doctors, or hospitals. Flowonix also required different levels of permission and security. This is especially important for Flowonix to keep in compliance with HIPAA regulations.
Before Salesforce was implemented, a lot of this work was done by hand and executed through paper transactions, requiring the same information to be manually entered into NAV at a later date.
Now, when new Accounts or Opportunities are created, the Flowonix team member is guided through an onboarding process. Salesforce, Conga Composer, and Conga Sign make it easy for Sales to gather and input the required information through a series of prompts and electronic forms. That information is used to generate new documents, shared for electronic signature, and fed back into Salesforce and NAV for updated recordkeeping and fulfillment.
Notifications, requests for approvals, and task assignments are automatically created through Salesforce to keep the process moving forward.
Custom Pricing Modules Made Easy
Part of Flowonix’s Account onboarding includes setting the customer’s pricing that needs to undergo management approval. CopperHill developed a custom object to guide the process and allow users to store customized pricing on the Account record so that it can be easily referenced. Before Salesforce, it was only visible within NAV which was a big pain point for the sales team during quoting.
With this, the user has the ability to select which products to include for the account, update pricing, set discounts, and automatically send to management for approval. No edits can be made to records while approval is pending – this ensures integrity of the records.
This pricing solution also uses Conga Sign. Once internal approvals are made, final pricing is sent to the customer for e-signature. After Flowonix receives the signed document, the onboarding documents are finalized.
Automate Patient Tracking, Order Placement, and Fulfillment
As mentioned earlier, Flowonix needs to track where its devices are at all times – this includes understanding which devices have been implanted into which patients. Up until this point, Flowonix’s customers and patients had no choice but to rely on paper documents to log implanted devices. Most of this was done by printing, handwriting, and faxing.
Often Flowonix sales representatives would go onsite to complete the implant device and order forms, which led to difficulties deciphering handwriting and sometimes significant data loss. The Flowonix order processing team would then manually digitize the paper documents by entering the details into spreadsheets.
Implementing Conga with Salesforce has drastically improved and streamlined these processes for Flowonix. Conga Composer and Sign combined with Salesforce Flows enables physicians and patients to digitally complete these forms for patient tracking and order placement. The integration with Salesforce and NAV pushes the patient and order information directly where it needs to go to kick off the fulfillment process. This saves Flowonix time, ensures accurate data capture, and eliminates the risk of error associated with duplicate data entry.
A Mobile Sales Team
Mobility was one of the biggest attractors that drew Flowonix to Salesforce. Since the external salespeople at Flowonix are constantly meeting with patients, physicians, and hospital administrators, it is crucial that the team can easily input and access notes, create and modify opportunities, and update inventory records from the field. Flowonix’s sales team can do all this from the Salesforce app. Most of them use a Flowonix issued iPad.
CopperHill also built a custom Salesforce component with logic to act as a system of controls for Opportunity and sales order creation. Sales can only select products that are both available to the customer and available in inventory. The Salesforce-NAV integration ensures that only the correct products can be ordered. This custom component also allows Sales to track and transfer inventory between each other, since most of them keep inventory on their persons at any given time.
The power of Salesforce, Conga, and CopperHill
By integrating Salesforce and NAV with AIR Connector ensures all parties at Flowonix have the most accurate and up-to-date information on inventory and opportunities. This integration paired with Conga Composer and Sign saves time, reduces the risk of errors, and enables transparency, all while keeping in compliance with Flowonix and HIPAA regulations.
Please contact us if you have any questions related to our Salesforce Solutions or Integration capabilities. You can learn more about Salesforce or Conga on their company websites. For more information about Flowonix Medical Inc, please visit https://flowonix.com/.
