Sanergy

Nearly two-fifths of the world’s population lacks access to adequate sanitation. It is the second largest cause of disease in the world, leading to infections that kill nearly 1.6 million children each year.

Sanergy is helping to tackle this problem – village by village, initially in Kenya, eventually across all of Africa. As Taylor Ray, an Insights and Innovations Associate at Sanergy, explains: “We address the entire sanitation value chain – from manufacturing and franchising toilets to collecting and converting waste into valuable by-products.”

Salesforce touches every point of this value chain, helping Sanergy reach more communities. Every day, the organisation provides affordable, hygienic sanitation to more than 12,000 people who are living in Kenya’s slums.

“Our model is based on empowering local entrepreneurs to set up their own micro sanitation enterprises. To ensure the success of this model, we need to track every toilet, every franchise, every loan and every kilo of waste across our network,” comments Ray.

Unlike other sanitation schemes, Sanergy converts the human waste from its toilets into useful by-products, such as organic fertilizer and renewable energy – both of which are in huge demand in Kenya.

For example, Sanergy uses Sales Cloud to measure the success of its marketing efforts – from poster campaigns in slums to opening ceremonies and door-to-door marketing.

It was the need for meaningful business metrics that first prompted Sanergy to deploy Salesforce in February 2012. “We wanted every decision to be founded on hard data,” comments Ray. “With Salesforce, we can track our progress in every way – it is our central brain for everything.”

In the coming months, Sanergy hopes to enable its 120 employees to tap into this central brain even when they are working in rural communities. The organisation is currently piloting a number of mobile apps and technologies, which will make it easier for teams to collect data.

Sanergy has already simplified and enhanced the user experience by using the Salesforce Platform to customise Sales Cloud. The next step is to integrate new apps focused on engineering and inventory management, which will give Sanergy greater visibility of the labour and materials needed to manufacture its toilets. Three hundred toilets have already made their way to Kenyan communities through Sanergy’s network of 154 Fresh Life Operators.