Global adhesive manufacturer strengthens customer relationships with Dynamics 365

A dynamic evolution

MAPEI started as a small family business supplying local construction companies with paint and masonry repair products in Milan, Italy, in 1937. Almost 90 years later, MAPEI has a global reputation for quality construction, with over 20 product lines, more than 30 research centers, and 84 production plants. Its 5,500 building products are used across industries and applications—from hotels and high-rise residential buildings to crucial infrastructure like train tunnels and bridges, to cultural sites like museums, tourist attractions, art installations, and places of worship. Its flooring products are found in many of the Olympic stadiums, including Sydney, Australia; Tianjin, China; and London, England. Its concrete admixture helps hold the water back in the Three Gorges Dam in China, and its masonry restoration techniques have been used to install a new theater in St. Francis, a French church built in 1200. The company’s sealant is even used to preserve the outdoor bronze replica of Michelangelo’s David in Florence, Italy. 

MAPEI scientists and R&D regularly partner with scientific, academic, and industrial research institutions to make safe, sustainable, and innovative solutions for construction and other site work. MAPEI also offers customers CAD diagrams, engineering assistance, and jobsite help—it’s even got a technical institute where customers can receive hands-on training and technical support for their installation projects. And it keeps growing and innovating, adding customers, internal users, and subsidiaries.

Each time MAPEI expands to a new market or acquires a company, its IT team is tasked with integrating the acquired company’s CRM system and customer data with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. If IT needed to scale the system to support more data, it required costly investments to install and maintain new hardware in a data center. 

“We had 90 different CRM systems with customizations in 90 different companies, across 57 countries,” Raffaele Gerbi, IT Corporate e-Business Manager at MAPEI says. “It was time to consolidate.”

To execute its mission to continually innovate, better engage customers with the right information and products for projects of all complexity levels, and to reduce operation costs needed to serve those customers, MAPEI has been embarking on a digital transformation journey. As part of that initiative, MAPEI wanted to migrate and consolidate its sales, customer service, and marketing solution from Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-premises—which the sales, customer service, and marketing systems had been running on for over a decade—to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the cloud. Its customers wanted self-service tools to access their projects and the expertise that MAPEI offers, especially when seeking the right products for their complex building challenges. 

“We knew Dynamics 365 was the way to go because we already believed in Microsoft products, and Dynamics 365 would reduce the cost and time needed for us to manage the sales, customer service, and marketing platform. The scalability of the cloud was also essential to our business goals. As passion and innovation are two of our main pillars, the company always seeks to grow and evolve.” 

"Microsoft helped us design the borders of the project and was at our side, every day, to help us troubleshoot and solve problems,” says Gerbi. Over the course of a year, teams from MAPEI and Microsoft worked together building a solution with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales.

Using Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, Gerbi’s team was able to standardize features, reducing the customization and complexity that came along with the legacy CRM systems used by subsidiaries. The team was able to move 90 different CRM systems into seven geo-localized instances of Dynamics 365, which will scale to support more users as MAPEI grows. 

“Dynamics 365 will allow us to accommodate each subsidiary's specific needs while enabling us to seamlessly increase our number of users in the system—even when adding new solutions and features,” says Gerbi.

More time to dedicate and innovate

“Because the complete gamut of Dynamics 365 features can be integrated into one solution, we can use Dynamics 365 to build and go to market with innovations in a way we were never able to do before,” says Gerbi. “My team has more time to dedicate to our customers, activate new business processes, and be more proactive in satisfying our sales, customer service, and marketing people.”

MAPEI teams use Dynamics 365 Marketing for high volume, personalized, outbound marketing campaigns, real-time customer journey orchestration and engaging customers through events. Dynamics 365 Marketing uses AI to turn data into real-time insights that helps MAPEI sales and customer service teams map a customer's journey, pinpoint the right timing for contact, and determine which channel would be most effective for reaching a customer. It helps marketing teams predict which products might be most relevant to a customer’s needs, so they come to the sales table with recommendations that are aligned and productive.

Using Dynamics 365 Sales, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities. 

With Dynamics 365, MAPEI gains a 360-degree view of its customers for a more personalized and engaging experience by providing every team access to customer interactions across the journey from marketing to sales to service. Agents can use Dynamics 365 to handle customer requests through any channel and juggle multiple customer sessions at once. 

Having all those functions wrapped up into one streamlined solution saves time on each task. The time that sales, marketing, and service staff are no longer spending managing technology and processes can now be spent on solving new customer problems. This leads to greater innovation, more successful teams, and happier customers. 

Gerbi says the MAPEI journey with Dynamics 365 is only getting started, and that plans are in the works to import data from its on-premises ERP system to Dynamics 365. Gerbi’s team is also experimenting with a pilot project for Dynamics 365 Field Service to discover how it can help sales and customer support teams access customer data and relevant workflows while they work onsite.   

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