Propel: Streamlining Product Success with Salesforce

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Ray Hein, Co-founder and CEO, PropelRay Hein, Co-founder and CEO
The influx of digital technologies has brought a drastic transformation in the product development landscape, forcing manufacturers to become more agile to keep up with tech-savvy consumers. Today, the scope of product development goes beyond just designing, developing, and marketing a product; it has more to do with customer relationships. Enterprises are now obligated to include their customers in the product development cycle to attain valuable feedback and maintain strong relationships. To facilitate this, companies need to embrace the notion of digital transformation in their product development lifecycles and do away with the confining notions of traditional, siloed on-premise product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms and Quality Management System (QMS).

Traditional product systems are hurdled by rigidly sequenced processes, strict division of responsibility among functions like engineering and sales, and completely siloed product data. These obstacles adversely affect multiple areas in product development, including product development, quality, customer satisfaction, and time-to-market.

What manufacturers need is a robust cloud-based platform that houses various functions, including PLM, CRM, and QMS, to augment the product development lifecycle by connecting the customer and product records. This is where California-based Propel makes a difference.

Comprised of industry veterans with in-depth know-how in PLM, QMS, high-tech manufacturing, and cloud technology, Propel is the first company to realize the potential of Salesforce in enhancing product development. The Propel platform on Salesforce AppExchange helps companies holistically repurpose Salesforce for their product development lifecycle—from concept to customer. Leveraging the best capabilities of both PLM and Salesforce for product lifecycle and customer relationship respectively - and more importantly connecting them to ensure seamless collaboration between sales and product development teams - Propel extends the definition of product success beyond engineering and product development to help manufacturers deliver the best possible experience to their customers.

"We are the first and only company to develop a robust suite of product solutions on the Salesforce Cloud, allowing manufacturers to achieve success by connecting people, systems, and processes needed to deliver products from concept to customer," says Ray Hein, co-founder and CEO of Propel.

An Integrated Platform to "Create, Commercialize, and Correct"

Built on Salesforce's next-generation, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, Propel combines the capabilities of PLM, commercialization, and QMS on a single platform. The platform serves the needs of the entire product lifecycle value chain, assisting manufacturers to "create, commercialize, and correct."

While its cloud-based PLM tool allows development teams to create and launch products faster, the commercialization capabilities help the sales and marketing team to communicate with sales and add customer feedback into the loop. Sales teams have visibility into engineering capacity, engineering teams can view sales pipelines, and both teams can seamlessly communicate with each other to ensure complete alignment on customer requests, accurate quotes, and on time delivery.

Built on Salesforce's next-generation, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, our solution combines the capabilities of PLM, commercialization, and QMS on a single platform.


On the quality management front, Propel integrates data gathered by the quality team, often during field services, and makes it available for the development team to improve the product design during the next production cycle. "In effect, our integrated and configurable platform enables contextual collaboration between product, commercial, and service teams," says Dario Ambrosini, CMO of Propel.

By integrating customer and product data, the solution allows companies to see product performance, measure its success, and gather insights to fill the gaps within the product design, as opposed to relying on multiple siloed product datasets and CRM records. This provides manufacturers a 360 degree view of both their customers and products, maximizing customer satisfaction while streamlining their product development, accelerating time to market, and ensuring quality throughout the process.

The Salesforce Advantage

As a true cloud-based solution built on the Salesforce cloud, Propel enables enterprises to ride the digital transformation wave while unlocking a range of benefits. First and foremost, as a SaaS solution, it can be easily deployed remotely and immediately made available to enterprises. According to Hein, the Propel solution suite can be implemented in an enterprise ecosystem within days, if not weeks, as opposed to yearlong or multi-year implementation cycles with legacy PLM systems, including Oracle Agile and SAP.

Recently, Propel collaborated with a company that spun-off from a large conglomerate. As a part of the spin-off terms and conditions, the company needed to launch its own technology stack within 12 months. Salesforce and Propel successfully made this deadline possible. With Salesforce as its CRM platform and Propel as its PLM and QMS solution, the company was able to launch its systems on an integrated platform within eight months. The extensibility of the Salesforce platform allowed for easy integration with SAP for ERP, allowing the company to meet its contractual deadline and launch a comprehensive technology stack with just two primary platforms.

Propel is one of the most sought-after solutions for manufacturers that are experiencing rapid growth or undergoing mergers and acquisitions because of the configurability and highly responsive nature of the solution.

As the platform enables a low-code/no-code implementation, companies can easily configure it according to their needs rather than changing their business model to align with the platform.

"Our integrated and configurable platform enables contextual collaboration between product development, commercial, and service teams"

Moreover, Propel leverages Salesforce's point-and-click administration capability and "clicks, not code" approach, to be highly responsive to the unexpected changes that may occur during product development. This helps enterprises launch new products and services in a manner that is radically different, effective, and fast from their current "rigid" business models. The platform also comes with all the infrastructure, network, and application security that Salesforce delivers. This provides customers with complete privacy and the highest level of performance.

Elaborating more on Propel’s value proposition, Hein recalls their recent engagement with a medical device company that had been growing through acquisitions. Even though the client had robust business practices for individual medical divisions, the growth to a billion-dollar company obligated them to adopt a common product development practice across all their facilities that were still using pre-acquisition systems. With multiple FDA regulated products in the market, the client had to be extremely responsive to changes in regulatory mandates while continuing to ensure the highest quality of their products. By collaborating with Propel, the client was able to come up with a common product development practice across their medical divisions in North America, EU, and Asia. The company went global and exceeded their rollout goals to expand their usage in other geographies also. The manufacturer was also able to complete FDA audits and approvals successfully. It was the speed and flexibility of Salesforce, coupled with Propel’s dedication and expertise in the industry that drove the success of this collaboration.

A Culture Driven by Innovation

Since its inception in 2015, Propel has been driving disruption in terms of technology and people—a fact that’s evident from its backing by several venture capital firms. The power of its dedicated team with deep industry expertise and experience has given Propel a five-year head start compared to its competitors. “This is why CIOs of several manufacturing firms find Propel as a reliable partner to help them increase revenue,” comments Ambrosini. By leveraging this edge, Propel is laser-focused on adding more capabilities to its solution suite and become a one-stop-shop for product developers of all sizes.

Having a well-established global presence with customers across North America, Europe, and the APAC region, Propel plans to focus on continued revenue growth. A major sales focus will be the European and Asia-Pacific markets, where there is a huge scope for Salesforce cloud-based solutions. “We are striving to reach high on the ladder as an innovative global leader in the upcoming years by working closely with Salesforce,” concludes Hein.

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Propel News

Propel Marks its Fourth Consecutive Year of Exponential Growth

Revenues and headcount double as the company expands presence in mid-market and enterprise segments.

Propel, the only product success platform built on the cloud, today announced 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth for fiscal year 2020. The company continued to execute its long term growth strategy, with mid-market and enterprise segments in MedTech, High Tech and consumer goods driving the majority of new customer revenue. Propel welcomed new customers such as Advanced Sterilization Products, Simplisafe, Vizio and Zume during the year.

The team doubled in size with key leadership hires across the entire company. Bill Aston joined Propel as Executive Vice President of Sales, Carmine Napolitano as Chief Finance Officer, Chuck Serrin as Vice President of MedTech and Life Sciences Industry Marketing, Dario Ambrosini as Chief Marketing Officer, Kevin Crothers as Vice President of Solution Consulting, Kishore Subramanian as VP Engineering and Mary De Frenchi as Vice President of Customer Success.

Propel brings any product-focused company and its value chains together by offering innovative cloud solutions needed to create, commercialize and correct successful products. The platform enables multiple teams — including engineering, sales, marketing, quality, service and partners — to collaborate on product success. Creating a seamless user experience for every person that touches the product record is key to Propel’s success, with the most dedicated customers exceeding 80 percent user adoption rates company-wide.

“As we enter our fifth year, more and more companies are agreeing with our original vision that product success is a team sport,” said Ray Hein, CEO of Propel. “The most successful product companies are embracing collaboration across their entire organization, resulting in better products and faster time to market.”

Propel’s Product 360 platform, combined with Salesforce’s Customer 360 Platform, offers unparalleled speed and flexibility to all internal and external teams from concept to customer. The platform delivers integrated product development, commercialization and service solutions that adapt to customers’ unique requirements to help them achieve their personalized definition of product success.

“We see increased adoption in companies spanning from various industries, including CPG, Medical Devices, High Tech and core Manufacturing. They chose Propel because our cloud solution is the fastest to deploy, highly flexible and easiest to use,” continued Hein. “Salesforce customers enjoy the added benefit of a single platform, where customer and product records can be fully integrated to accelerate sales and customer service interactions with their own customers.”

For more information, visit www.propelplm.com.



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