SOPHIA

Reference — Interior fit-out manufacturer × Sophia

Every inquiry one of a kind.
Every quote in minutes

An internationally renowned German family business manufactures surfaces and fit-out elements for high-end interiors. No two inquiries are alike, and none can be answered from a price list.

Sophia takes over the path from incoming mail to the quote in the ERP. Sales decides, the machine calculates and writes.

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Data plate

Customer

Internationally renowned German family business, surfaces and fit-out elements for high-end interiors

Size

Over 100 employees, revenue in the double-digit millions

Market

Project business worldwide: architects, interior contractors, building owners

Production

Made to order and project-specific, plus a product range of its own

Systems

abas ERP, inbox (Microsoft Exchange), document management

< 1 hr

response time — previously 2–3 days

8 of 10

cases without rework

≥ 20 min

saved per case

4,000+

items in the master data

In three lines — where it jammed, what we did, what runs now

Before

Back and forth, none of it documented

Four case types in one inbox, and every inquiry travelled by hand between mail, ERP, sales system and side tables. How to calculate was written down nowhere — it lived in the heads of a few people.

Intervention

Sophia sits on inbox and ERP

Inquiries are recognized, calculated against the live item master and written to abas as opportunity, quote or order.

Now

Review and approve instead of typing

Inquiries and orders are handled in minutes. Inside sales only decides the exceptions, and the time freed up goes into the customer relationship.

Wood surface in close-up detail
Material warehouse with high racks

01

Reference 01 — The company

Sold by
specification

A house that has been building surfaces and fit-out elements for demanding interiors for decades, with deep vertical integration and a lot of craftsmanship. Not from a catalogue: the architect describes what they need and receives a quote for it.

That is exactly the strength of the brand and the burden of inside sales. Every inquiry is a small calculation that starts as a mail and has to end as a quote in the ERP.

02

Reference 02 — Before and now

Everything in heads.
Nothing in the system

The story: an inquiry arrives by mail — sometimes in English, sometimes in foreign units, always one of a kind. Whoever wants to answer it reads by hand, jumps between systems and calculates by rules that live in just a few heads. The knowledge was there. It was just never in the system — and that is exactly what every quoting time hinged on.

The attempt before us: a Salesforce rollout — around 500,000 euros and four years, without real success. We came in to rescue exactly that.

Before

Four years of Salesforce rollout without a breakthrough

Every mail read by hand

Back and forth between systems

Calculations only in heads

Translating before calculating

Waiting on a few people

Now

→Every thread is classified on arrival, customer and attachment resolved.

→One case, one path: opportunity, quote and order are created directly in abas.

→The commercial rules live in the platform as versioned, readable logic.

→English and foreign units run along, without an extra step.

→Inside sales approves instead of typing, and inquiries are answered in minutes.

03

Reference 03 — At work

What is not certain
gets asked

W/01

The inbox sorts itself

Every thread is classified on arrival: quote, price inquiry, sample, order. What belongs together stays together.

W/02

Calculated against the live master

Items and prices come from the running ERP, never from a copy. What is not certain arrives as a clarification, never as a guessed price.

W/03

Written into the ERP

Objects are created where the process expects them, with the company’s fields and conventions. No second system, no re-keying.

W/04

A human approves

Before every write into the production system there is a stop. Full automation is a customer decision, never a default.

W/05

Sample requests as their own path

Own catalogue, own pricing, own shipping, same platform. The result is a ready-to-ship case.

W/06

Clarifications are a data finding

Where the machine asks back, there is almost always a master data problem behind it. The company cleans up its master data without setting up a project for it.

Results — measured, not claimed

No-touch rate

8 of 10 cases without human intervention

Cycle time

under 1 hour per inquiry — previously 2–3 days

Error rate

0 silent errors — deviations escalate automatically

Completed transactions

Opportunity, quote and order — directly in abas

Relief per case

at least 20 minutes saved

Master data findings resolved

over 300 items corrected

The real win is in none of these lines. It is the time inside sales has again for the customer.

And the freed-up time keeps working: it goes into building the next agents on Sophia — they read signals from the market, customer news and ordering behaviour and turn them into inquiries and orders. More revenue from new and existing customers. Signal-to-Cash →

Measured from the first case, against a shared baseline, reported monthly.

Your inside sales
can do this too

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