Kirey Group supports Pirelli in the selection and implementation of AppDynamics and ThousandEyes solutions for the monitoring project that includes the B2B portal, dedicated to dealers, and the new CRM.
Founded in 1872, Pirelli is one of the world's leading tyres manufacturers, specializing exclusively in tyres for cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and related services.
Pirelli holds a distinctive positioning in High-Value tyres, products with a high technological component, in which it has more than 3,800 homologations thanks to a consolidated partnership with the most prestigious manufacturers. To achieve the highest levels in terms of performance, safety, and environmental impact reduction, Pirelli has always been strongly committed to Research & Development, an area in which it has invested 6 percent of its High-Value revenues in 2021.
Pirelli's Digital Transformation
In 2018 Pirelli launched a major digital transformation project involving all company departments - sales, supply chain, manufacturing, and finance - in a global perspective extended to all markets in which Pirelli operates. The project stems from the company's need to redesign its operating model to improve the organization's efficiency through a more agile and digitized structure, and to generate new growth opportunities for the company by strengthening its positioning in High-Value market segments, as well.
"The project is ambitious," explains Andrea Moneta, Global Head of IT Sales, Marketing and CRM Solutions at Pirelli. "We are dealing not only with a technological transformation but with a profound overhaul of the way the company operates in the world."
The transformation has been promoted from four areas identified as strategic by the company: sales, integrated planning, product development, and production. The collaboration with Kirey Group fits into the first area, the world of sales and CRM, which today represents one of the areas where Pirelli's digital transformation is most advanced and where the company can measure tangible benefits from the new way of working.
Pirelli's tools: B2B+ e CRM
Pirelli relied on two key applications in the area of sales and relationship management with dealers (tyre dealers, leasing companies, retailers) and its own sales force: for the former, an e-commerce portal called B2B+, which is being revamped; for the latter, the new Salesforce-based CRM platform. To optimize the B2B+ portal, Pirelli needed a monitoring system that would allow end-to-end observability of customer experience and performance. After considering leading software vendors in the industry, the company chose AppDynamics, within the collaborative project initiated with Kirey Group.
"The broad portfolio and functionality of AppDynamics solutions fully met our needs and were in line with our expectations," comments Andrea Moneta. "In this context we relied on Kirey Group, which was able to accompany us step by step in the implementation, taking special care of system configuration and customization."
AppDynamics provides complete end-to-end visibility into the applications' performance, including all components of the ecosystem, and their interconnections.
With this solution, Pirelli has initiated end-to-end monitoring that starts from the user experience and goes all the way down to the services delivered by the back-end systems. These include SAP, for which to date AppDynamics is the only solution on the market that can guarantee such detailed monitoring. This allows the company to keep track of all performance at all times, not only of the application but of the entire chain, monitoring the customer experience and the performance of all those systems that are invisible to the customer but contribute to determining the customer experience. Today Pirelli is able to know the availability of systems at all times and, thanks to specific alerts, anticipate any problems and take action even before any degradation occurs. AppDynamics' Cognition Engine makes it possible to automatically detect anomalies and immediately identify their causes, thus managing to isolate the source of the problem in a matter of minutes, both at the source code level and the infrastructure level.
"The B2B portal is a key element for Pirelli," Moneta points out. "Today it is adopted in almost all the countries where we operate and represents one of the main digital sales channels for Pirelli."
The new CRM: from perception to reality
In 2021 Pirelli launched the ambitious rollout of its CRM solution by introducing the platform in 40 countries around the world, all within a single year. "Again, the challenge was substantial not only from a technological point of view but also from a process and organizational redesign point of view," explains Andrea Moneta. "To achieve full adoption of the new CRM, it was essential to ensure high performance and stability of the developed solution. Hence the strong need to equip ourselves with a dedicated monitoring tool." To achieve accurate monitoring similar to the B2B portal one, the most suitable solution for Pirelli's Salesforce-based CRM turned out to be ThousandEyes, which allows monitoring of end-to-end application performance across the entire digital delivery ecosystem, from users to the cloud. With the support of Kirey Group, we started active monitoring, with scripts being built to simulate user behavior on the CRM to monitor a given subset of navigation flows on the system.
"With the monitoring of our CRM, we have moved from a dimension of general awareness of the events by the users, to understanding the real status," explains Andrea Moneta. "With ThousandEyes we now have full visibility into the worldwide performance of the tool, and we can also bring to light any objective issues in the use phase, related for example to geographic positioning, being able to think about the optimization of the infrastructure worldwide."
Optimizing Performance
Overcoming initial mistrust regarding the change in working methods, thanks to a particularly careful transformation based on the reliability of the systems and the trust of those who use them, most people at Pirelli now use the new CRM. The project carried out with Kirey Group laid the groundwork for possible future evolutions of the new B2B portal. In fact, at this stage, Kirey Group is working with Pirelli to implement the monitoring system for the new B2B Commerce, which, differently from the current B2B Plus (on-premise), will be based on a hybrid, cloud-based application infrastructure.
"The setup of a monitoring system is a very complex process that is often not given the proper attention," Andrea Moneta concludes. "Kirey Group proved to be a reliable and effective partner in guiding us in configuring a tailor-made system built on our needs. For this reason, we involved Kirey Group right from the start in our new project and the collaboration continues successfully."
In the development of the new portal, it will be crucial for Pirelli to initiate from day one a timely monitoring to measure the new performance and to be accompanied, once again, in the choice of the best solutions and their customization to reap the maximum value from the ongoing digital transformation.
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