Zoho Development Stories #3: Executing from design to delivery with Zoho at RJG

March 15, 2024

Episode 3 of the ZohoDay24 Development Stories series

In this installment of the Intellyx video series, Zoho Development Stories, we replay our most interesting interviews from ZohoDay 2024 in McAllen, Texas. This episode, hosted by JE, features Jason Yoffy, Director of Product at RJG Inc. interviewed by Intellyx Director & Principal Analyst Jason “JE” English.

RJG Inc. is a global training, consulting, and technology company that shares knowledge related to injection molding with customers in the medical and automotive sectors. RJG uses Zoho One to manage sales, support, project management, and analytics, and notes a net annual benefit of $716,995 and an annual ROI of 776%. Case study here: https://www.zoho.com/crm/customers/rjg.html

Transcript:

JE: Hi, I’m Jason English, Director and Principal Analyst of Analyst Firm Intellyx, based out of the Netherlands. We’re very interested in covering today’s topic with RJG’s Yoffy, who’s here to talk about what kinds of technologies they’re enabling with Zoho and very, very interesting process. So can you kind of describe Yoffy, how do you apply Zoho in your current process, and then where do you go from there?

Yoffy: Thanks for having me. Yeah. Just a little background on RJG where I, in the plastic injection molding industry, we offer training and technology to plastic injection molding businesses to help optimize and control their processes so they can reduce waste and create better parts. This is pretty significant when we’re talking about medical delivery devices or, or the automotive industry.

So we pride ourselves in saving lives and reducing waste. Plastic waste in the production processes for everything from automotive to phones to medical devices. In 2018, we started, we realized we needed more robust internal systems to handle customer interactions from the sales side and from the customer support side.

So we did a six month long process where we looked at the difference between Salesforce and Zoho. In terms of their capabilities understanding how they’ve matched our needs or the problems we had within our organization from an enterprise standpoint and ended up choosing Zoho at the, at the end of the, at the end of the day our projected return on investment for using Zoho at the time was 758% with a payback within a year.

We recently did some analysis with another analyst firm, and they have shown that it was a 251 percent return on investment in five months. So we started off using So we’re implementing Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk as they fit together and are the applications that support our customer experience.

And then we’ve expanded that out to 23 different Zoho apps. So we’re really using Zoho One pretty broadly. Maybe not broadly as other people, but 23 apps is a lot. It’s turning into being a true operating system for our business and providing us tremendous value.

JE: I imagine a big part of the value is that your customers probably come from a variety of different backgrounds because they’re from totally different industries.

Some of them might be more on the product design side. Some might be more on the administrative side, some might even be in a production line type thing. So how do you kind of handle these, such a variety of different customer needs?

Yoffy: Yeah, the CRM allows us to categorize our customers into different market segments like that.

So we have molders in production. We’ve got mold makers who are cutting steel and putting our sensors into the steel. CRM is just flexible enough to allow us to create market segments that. That we can take a look at customer types, you know A, B, C customers or by different industries. So it’s just Zoho is very flexible from a CRM standpoint into meeting our needs and as well as It’s really awesome to be able to, as our needs evolve and as our business changes, Zoho is there to be able to support that and we can easily make changes or edits to our applications as we see fit.

JE: I think a big part of your business sounds like it’s not just the providing the parts and the technology, it’s really the knowledge transfer required. To successfully produce these kinds of goods, which are very specialized. So how do you how do you get that done?

Yoffy: Yeah, so we produce sensors in house we’ve got a small manufacturing portion of our, of our headquarters and we’ve been using Zoho Creator to help integrate our ERP, which is Sage.

With Zoho CRM and desk and our repair center. So we can have a customer record that, and a product record. So we know where our products go, and we know what products are being returned and why. And take us through that, that whole process. I think one success story for Creator is that, For a long time, we were passing paper around with serial numbers for every product.

And I think four to six people were writing serial numbers during the day. We had one team member who spent four hours of her day. Writing serial numbers from one place to another. We took creator and created our own custom application that allows serial numbers to happen automatically. And we then took her role and put her into a different position so she could provide more value for the company.

So it was really cool to take somebody from being a secretary writing serial numbers—now she’s a specialized UX designer. She has a visual design background, and so it was cool to utilize Zoho to number one, help an employee with her career path but also reduce a lot of the manual things that were happening and have been happening for a long time as we scale up.

JE: Yeah, a lot of people underestimate it’s not just digitization. It’s not just taking. Taking the data of serial numbers and and putting that into a system, but it’s the digitalization of the whole process. So it really changes how you think about how you produce goods because I mean, yes a especially a complex part could have like a paper trail that that is that takes up, you know reams of paper.

Yoffy: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve got calibrations because their sensors and all of that comes into play in terms of the production. We also have more insight into supplier quality and on time delivery. You know, some of these things were–we would wait a quarter to look at the data. to understand it.

Now it’s all real time and we can see it. We can see it now as opposed to waiting a quarter and doing a bunch of work to understand our on-time delivery.

JE: Yeah. So pretty cool. So, a lot of it’s not just what the customers are doing, it’s also what those suppliers are doing. What, you know, what are the material characteristics of all those, of their parts and how are they involved in the, so how have you, how has it kind of helped you navigate that that side of it?

Yoffy: It’s just given us transparency that we didn’t have before. I think transparency in all the applications is a very positive thing when you’re talking about collaboration. I think transparency and collaboration throughout all apps are the biggest indirect value. We were lucky enough to implement Zoho before COVID.

And as we dispersed across the globe, you know, we have seven offices in seven different countries. 131 employees. And during COVID we could still operate because we had Zoho in place and we had the collaboration tools like click and connect and our CRM and, and help desk and everything was, was there for us when we really needed it and when the world was, was rapidly changing.

So it was cool to, to be able to go high, go remote and still operate. And then now we’re hybrid remote. So we still operate both in office and at home. And Zoho is a huge key to that.

JE: Yeah, having that digital backbone that helps you survive a period like that like nothing else could. I mean, and the ones who couldn’t adapt would, you know, probably not make it through that sort of period.

Yoffy: Yeah, you know, if we had our previous CRM, it was SalesLogic, and it was server based, and you’d have to put an instance on a laptop on every salesperson’s laptop, and it would have just been a nightmare. Pretty fortunate and grateful to have Zoho in place before, before that happened.

JE: Do you think your capabilities have, especially as you did, use digitalization to really expand them?

Has it expanded your market too? Has it brought in new kinds of business that you didn’t have before? Or, is it more just you’re able to do more for the customers that you have?

Yoffy: With the transparency comes the standardization of processes. And so it’s important for our sales team in North America to go through the sales processes in a certain way and have that happen in our international offices as well.

It really is great for continual improvement—if you’re not changing, you’re dying in business. So Zoho affords us the opportunity to be able to continually improve and optimize our processes both outside the tool and inside the tool. So we can make adjustments as our business grows and scales and changes.

You know, our sales strategy changes. Our CRM is there for us and we can make changes to it. It’s very cool in that it can grow with us and that we, it’s got a lot of capabilities, so we can also grow into it as well. So there are a bunch of things in Zoho that we don’t use, that we want to use in the future.

It’s cool that it’s, it’s customizable. You could use it out of the box, but it’s customizable. And then you can continually improve upon it as, as your business changes.

JE: Oh, that’s fascinating. Anything else that you just found particularly interesting about this journey that you’ve gone? How long have you been a Zoho user and how’s that journey progressed?

Yoffy: Yeah, I’ve been a Zoho user for seven years. I’ve been at RJG almost seven years, maybe a Zoho user for eight years. I was using it a little bit at a startup before I moved to RJG. Man, it just, I don’t know, allows us to be at our fullest potential. You know, it’s kind of like a superpower, a business superpower, where we’re able to use these tools and this technology to be better business people and to work better together.

So, you know, more collaboration, more transparency faster, more efficient. So all around, it’s just, it gives us It gives us that superpower of, of being able to evolve as a business person. So it’s pretty exciting to continue to change and have it change with us. I think is pretty sweet. Awesome.

JE: All right. Great. Thanks Yoffy for joining me. It’s been super interesting to follow your journey here on this. So thanks for joining us. This has been Jason English from Intellyx at the Zoho Day Conference 2024.

Yoffy: Thanks, Jason. Thanks.