Westing built the structure before accelerating growth

In recent years, Westing has made targeted efforts to digitalize and develop systems that streamline work processes, improve collaboration, and facilitate further growth. Together with system provider Business Online, the company has taken significant steps toward a more structured and data-driven way of working, resulting in better customer follow-up, higher data quality, and a stronger basis for decision-making. This initiative has now been featured in Finansavisen, and below you can read the full customer story:

Structure First, Then Growth

Westing has supplied paint systems and consulting services to ships and industry since 1981. From Hareid in Sunnmøre, the company serves customers along the entire Norwegian coast and has developed into AkzoNobel's largest paint distributor in Europe.

With a new growth phase ahead, Westing realized that their way of working was too cumbersome to continue growing.

Information was very scattered across Teams, email, personal folders, and local desktops. And, not least, in notebooks. We lacked a clear structure linked to customers and projects. It was difficult to find things, and much was floating around, says Agathe Teige Eiksund, CEO of Westing.

Like many other growing companies, Westing saw that what worked today could become cumbersome as more employees, customers, and projects were added. Therefore, they chose to organize and build structure before further growth. The goal was simple: the systems should work for the company, not against it.

The Challenge Was Greater Than a New CRM System Could Solve

The starting point was a need for better and closer customer follow-up and improved internal collaboration. Westing saw the need for a CRM system and also considered strengthening its staffing. Along the way, it became clear that the challenge involved more than just sales and customer data.

We spent an incredible amount of time searching and coordinating. It was ultimately about how we worked with documents, projects, processes, and collaboration, says Eiksund.

Agathe Teige Eiksund, CEO of Westing.

In 2025, Westing implemented Business Online. Customer information, projects, processes, quality, and documentation thus gained a common structure in one platform integrated with Microsoft 365.

We had tried other CRM systems before, but it was a big plus that Business Online was part of the Microsoft ecosystem we already worked in. We didn't have to deal with a completely new interface and could build upon Teams, Outlook, and the tools people already knew, says Eiksund.

That the solution was familiar to users was one thing. At least as important was that the information had a clear place.

Now, all documents have a natural home. There is a clear logic in how they are organized, and that makes them much easier to find again. They can be linked to a company, a project, or stored as governing documentation.

For Eiksund, it was important that the system should make it easier to share information in practice.

It's easy to say that employees should share more. If that just means more emails and more people on copy, then you end up with even more noise and less overview. You have to give them a system where information has a natural place.

Common Structure Unites Sales and Technical Teams

Westing has both commercial salespeople and technical inspectors. They meet different people at the customer's site and contribute with different expertise. Good interaction between the roles is crucial when a project is to be followed up and quality assured.

We have weekly meetings where we review project lists and lead lists. It's not just one person who holds all the information then. It becomes an interaction where several can contribute to both projects and leads, says Eiksund.

In the project workspace in Business Online, each project has both a sales manager and a technical manager. Both work with the same information.

The sales team and the technical team are much more successful at working as one team now. They have a common platform to work in.

She also notes that capacity has increased.

Not because we work more, but because we work more structured. We spend less time searching, and there is less risk of things falling through the cracks or being left with individuals.

From Scattered Information to Proactive Sales Work

As part of their sales efforts, Westing uses a ship register that provides an overview of which paint systems vessels have and when they are due for drydock. Previously, this information was scattered across Excel, email, and individuals. This made it more difficult to plan sales work and follow up with customers in advance.

Now, vessels are gathered in a ship register in Business Online, linked to the correct customer and project. Salespeople can set alerts before the next drydock and follow up with the customer well in advance.

For example, we can get an alert six months before a ship is due for drydock. The salesperson then knows that we need to be proactive and reach out to the customer. The ship register allows us to plan and work systematically with customer follow-up in a completely different way, says Eiksund. Now that Westing is scaling its sales organization to seize new market opportunities, the structure in Business Online is already in place.

New employees can find customer and project history themselves, follow a common work method, and spend more of their time on customers and sales-related work. They are less dependent on finding the right colleague or asking someone to forward an old email.

It is incredibly much easier to be a new employee at Westing today. People get up to speed much faster and can spend their time on customer work instead of searching for information. We are no longer dependent on individuals' notebooks, says Eiksund.

It also makes the management job easier. Eiksund can follow projects, see what's going on, and build routines around a common way of working.

For Westing, the goal was to prepare the company before growing pains set in. Now they can build the sales organization further on a structure that is already in place and works in practice.

This experience has made Agathe Teige Eiksund clear on what other growth companies should prioritize.

My advice to other growth companies? Get the structure in place and move from person-dependence to system – from individual ways of working to one common way of working.