SAP Partner Consensus Embraces Cloud, Innovation, and Improving Lives
SAP partner Consensus is more than an IT company; its employees believe family, community, and environment are important company objectives.
Innovation and cloud computing are at the forefront of its strategy to help customers become best-run businesses and make an impact.
Becoming a Company of the Future Through Purpose
For Consensus, it is important to be a leader – not only from the perspective of business metrics, but also by expressing company values.
“We strive to be a company of the future,” stated Andrés Castrillόn, president of Consensus International. “Our company purpose is making the world a better place and improving lives through technology and human connection. Our values include teamwork, kindness, creativity, and excellence. These allow us to break down barriers and allow real problems to be solved. They guide our everyday decisions and actions.”
Putting Company Values into Action
Consensus has embraced the goal of helping customers become businesses and delivering on its vision of how these companies succeed.
“We believe a best-run business puts the customer first,” said Castrillόn. “We embrace a customer-centric approach, which ultimately results in the greatest outcome for our customers and, therefore, long-term relationships. We enable them to become efficient, more innovative and perform at higher levels. This makes their lives and their customers’ and employee’s lives better.”
Reducing Plastics in Landfills with Global Surplus Exchange
Previously known as BlueTrading LLC, Global Surplus Exchange is a customer that also wants to improve lives. Its business recycles plastics, such as printer cartridges and other obsolete products like floppy discs and video cassettes. The company also manages thousands of part numbers every year, of which 80 percent will be reused. By refurbishing and selling millions of these products globally each year, Global Surplus Exchange can help drastically reduce the amount of plastics in landfills.
Global Surplus Exchange initially contacted Consensus to help manage enormous amounts of data that came along with parts. Now, with the help of SAP Business One, the company has efficiencies that help it save anywhere from 35-45 percent on processing time alone, which allows for spending more time reducing plastic waste.
“Having purpose and focus was key to our growth,” said Alfredo Alvarado, CEO of Global Surplus Exchange. “We are constantly redefining and articulating our purpose. Working with another purpose-driven company like Consensus makes things easier. They understand the goals we set for ourselves, and we think of them as much more than service providers. They are our partners.”
Global Surplus Exchange on keeping landfills free of cartridges with Consensus and SAP Business One
Embracing the Cloud to Make Change
Being a business of the future also means utilizing new and better technologies within Consensus itself.
“We embrace the cloud ourselves. Nineteen out of 20 of our customers are buying software to run on our cloud. They would rather have us manage it so they can have peace of mind with their IT infrastructure,” Castrillόn said. “The cloud provides smaller companies with access to backup and cyber protection options that would be too expensive for them to run on premise.
“We are passionate about technology and about people. We want to enable small and midsize companies through innovations like the cloud and impact people’s lives while doing so. We want our technology to work for the business of course, but we also want it to work for the people and the users. We want users to experience a better work-life balance, and have less repetition and stress, so they feel empowered, efficient, and can give their best to their own customers, vendors, colleagues
“Our Customer Portal is a great example of our innovation factory,” Castrillόn concluded. “Consensus customers can use it for free to improve their relationships with their own customers, vendors, and employees. The portal gives them access to real-time information; for instance, a customer could access their own account statement or pay an invoice, and a vendor may retrieve a purchase order or inventory information without emailing back and forth.”
Consensus is a leader in the Next-Generation Partnering initiative. It is helping companies execute in the cloud efficiently, integrate applications, and help SAP customers focus on their companies in order to drive business results.