Meet the Green Energy Company Founded in the 19th Century

Vestas is a global energy company with the incredible distinction of having been founded in 1898 – yes, not 1998 – 1898! The company started within a blacksmith shop in Western Denmark far before “going green” was fashionable.

Today, Vestas produce, sell and maintain wind power plants and turbines, while employing over 20,000 people from around the world. The company also has the distinction of being the only global energy company dedicated exclusively to wind energy. This would be a pretty good place to be because since 2000, the International Energy Agency has raised its long-term wind forecast five times.

Given the rapidly growing demand for renewable energy, and the plummeting price of oil over the last two years, Vestas appears perfectly positioned for even more growth. According to Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, there’s more good news for renewable energy on the horizon.

“We’re in a low-cost-of-oil environment for the foreseeable future,” Leibreich stated while delivering a keynote address at the recent BNEF Summit in NYC. “Did that stop renewable energy investment? Not at all.”

Not only are external expectations high for Vestas, but the company’s stated goal is to grow their service revenue by 40% in 3 years. However, this aspiration coupled with the increasing global demand for renewable energy presented Vestas with a few technical challenges.

Vestas end-users in the sales area, were saying that in order to remain responsive to customers, they required more agility within the on premise CRM solution. Reps in the field needed more effective “off-line” capabilities including the ability to work remotely from iPads. Additionally, not only were sales leads acquired by service not reaching salespeople, but reps were heading into meetings with customers that had service issues that they weren’t even aware of.

Within the service area, there was a need for a better customer experience when tickets for issues were opened up. Issues were not being resolved after the initial request and calling back for the same problem was making for some unhappy customers.

The company decided to conduct workshops with various vendors (including SalesForce.com), with what the company describes as the “real end-users” to help identify a solution. Remarkably, it was during the very first interactive workshop that Vestas employees quickly realized that what they were looking for could be found via the SAP Hybris Cloud for Sales & Service solution.

With the SAP solution,Vestas is now:

• Faster in responding to their customer’s needs
• Leveraging mobile capabilities to access and update customer information in real time
• Enabling their service tech’s to upsell customers directly within a service call, or route the call directly to sales
• Driving better customer loyalty while increasing footprint in the market place 

John Tholstrub Bendtsen, IT Global Business Partner, Vestas, believes that the impact of implementing SAP Hybris Cloud for Sales and Service has been providing the company with a “whole new way of working” and further added that, “SAP supports the strategic direction we foresee in our business.”

With this cloud solution, salespeople at Vestas are empowered with critical information prior to meeting with potential customers, and the service group now has the right tools to provide faster service times and one call resolution.

This is great news because according to BNEF, every time global wind power doubles, there’s a 19% drop in cost. These developments invariably mean that more people concerned about the environment can use wind as a renewable energy source and are better able to go green.

Ideally, a few of these same people have their own idea for a future earth-sustaining business. If they need a little inspiration, they can always look to that very forward-thinking blacksmith that founded Vestas more than a century ago!

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