How Oneworld Alliance Logistics is preparing for the next generation of success with Salesforce

Philippines logistics company Oneworld Alliance is using Salesforce to drive efficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic and in a rapidly changing business environment. 

From humble beginnings as a family-run startup in 2003, Manila-based Oneworld Alliance Logistics Corporation has rapidly developed into one of the largest logistics companies in the Philippines. In fact, the company has achieved double digit year-on-year growth for most of its 17-year history. 

However, Miko Sumagang, Technical Adviser at Oneworld Alliance Logistics Corporation and son of the company founders, knew that to continue to achieve this level of success in an increasingly demanding and competitive business environment, the company needed to embrace digital transformation. 

“Logistics tends to be a heavily paper-based industry, and our company was certainly managed in that way,” says Sumagang. “Our processes were manual and quite basic. On top of that, we were relying on legacy systems that were essentially broken.”

Sumagang and his parents split their time between Toronto and Manila, and managing the company remotely has been a challenge in the past. 

“Just Iike many traditional companies, a lot of our processes were managed in Excel spreadsheets with each job requiring multiple copies and handling of paper forms,” he says. “This led to a lot of siloed data, and reports used to take around three weeks to generate. As such, there was very little transparency into our day-to-day operations, and this was hindering our ability to scale the company.”

Sumagang explains that siloed data not only created inefficiencies, but also presented a significant risk to the company: “It means you have a small number of people within the company controlling access to departmental data, which is certainly not ideal. Thankfully, deploying Salesforce has drastically reduced this risk.”

Sumagang successfully oversaw the implementation of Salesforce in May 2018. He and his team built new custom financial systems on Salesforce Customer 360 and deployed Sales Cloud as their new CRM system.

“I had experience with Salesforce from a previous role at a different company, so I knew it was the way forward for us,” he says. “Salesforce can be moulded into whatever you need it to be, and we had the internal expertise to use the Salesforce platform to build a custom system from the ground up. It made sense for us to bake in our sales processes through Sales Cloud, and integrating third-party providers into the system has been truly phenomenal.” 

This has delivered much greater transparency into the company’s workflows, and Sumagang and his team are using it to their advantage: “For example, we can now see which products are inside our shipping containers. So we can proritoise food-related shipments or sanitary equipment such as medical masks.”  

But that’s not the only benefit Salesforce has delivered. Sumagang says that his team can now generate reports in around six business days. Before Salesforce, this took up to three weeks. 

There has also been a 50 per cent efficiency improvement in the company’s administrative processes, and an 85 to 98 per cent efficiency improvement in back-office processes such as processing payments, cheque releases and retrieval of documents.

While those numbers are certainly impressive, Sumagang says that the new transparency Salesforce has brought to the business is just as important as improved efficiency, if not more so. “Greater operational transparency is absolutely one of the biggest impacts that Salesforce was able to provide to our team,” he says. “It is particularly vital when you’re trying to manage a business from halfway around the world.”

Sumagang’s vision in deploying Salesforce prior to the COVID-19 outbreak has also proved vital to helping the company manage the pandemic. With pharmaceutical and essential goods providers among their largest clients, it was vital for Oneworld Alliance to continue operating. This was a mighty challenge considering restrictions in the Philippines meant the company had to send half of its workforce home. 

“Salesforce has been instrumental in helping us maintain operations throughout the pandemic,” says Sumagang. “Salesforce has given us the ability to adapt as fast as COVID-19 is changing the business landscape, and has enabled us to continue our work processes with our limited capacity.

“Salesforce also gives us a way to disseminate information across the company in a more formalised fashion. We have gone paperless in a heavily paper-based industry, which means gone are the days when our employees would have to physically walk between departments carrying paper slips. This limits physical interactions, which of course is paramount to preventing workplace infections.”

While Sumagang admits that COVID-19 has changed the company’s short-term priorities, he sees a positive future ahead. 

“It is amazing to me that we have had such a high growth rate in the past without doing any marketing,” he says. “After COVID-19, this is something I’d like to focus on. I can see how moving onto Marketing Cloud in the future can help to kick start our marketing engine, and we now have the ability to scale much more quickly through the Salesforce platform. 

“We’ve only had Salesforce for about two years, and it has already had a phenomenal impact on our business. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do with it over the next two years.”