Egged Plus

Egged Plus is Israel’s largest public transport group, with about 4,300 buses and 11,000 employees in Israel and Europe. Beyond its public bus lines, Egged Plus sells charter transport through its sales organization, Egged Plus: buses with drivers for companies, schools, municipalities, non-profits, groups and tourists.

The project leveraged several Zoho products: Zoho CRM Plus at the core, Zoho Writer and Zoho Sign for contracts, Zoho Catalyst for integration services, and Zoho Forms for customer and supplier feedback. Moving forward, Egged Plus’s educational division will join the same platform in January 2027.

Egged Plus needed one system that could price a complex multi-ride deal correctly, control discounts, get the contract signed, and pass every approved order to its two core systems: SAP for finance, and YIT/FleetControl for bus dispatch. No one should have to type an order twice.

Egged Plus’s charter sales had no CRM before the project: prices went to customers by WhatsApp or e-mail. MLY designed the whole process from lead to dispatch, migrated 2,380 customer accounts and 1,589 contacts, and took the system live on 16 August 2026, about two months after the build started.

Egged Plus began as a cooperative and grew into a modern transport group; today the Keystone Foundation and the Teachers’ Funds own 78% of its shares. Alongside public transport, Egged Plus sells charter and contract transport through Egged Plus. The platform serves its Transportation division today; the Educational division joins in January 2027, and more divisions will follow.

Charter sales are a different business from running bus lines. Every deal is a custom mix of routes, dates, vehicle types and add-ons, and a single deal can hold more than 20 rides. Each deal must be priced, approved and signed, then carried out by Egged Plus’s operations, and finance must know the customer before the first bus leaves.

The project brought this whole chain onto one platform, Zoho CRM, in Hebrew, connected in real time to SAP and to Egged Plus’s dispatch system.

Our charter business is complex: every deal is built from different routes, dates, vehicle types and add-ons. We needed a partner who understands both our operation and Zoho in depth. MLY didn’t just build what we asked for; they challenged us to rethink the process, from the first lead to the bus on the road.

— Shlomi Alkalay, Egged Plus

Moving Egged Plus’s charter sales onto a CRM raised four challenges that had to be solved together. Before the project, Egged Plus’s charter sales had no CRM. Reps answered customers by WhatsApp or e-mail, usually with a price from memory, so each pricer reached a different number. Managers had no view of incoming inquiries, discounts had no approval process, and customers did not sign a formal contract. The organization could not analyze the prices it offered or the deals it closed. Route distances came from a separate Google Sheets tool.

The primary issue was pricing. A charter price depends on driver hours, fuel, maintenance, tolls, overnight stays, time of day and seasonal surcharges, across vehicle types from minibuses to 60-seat buses. Some vehicles, such as VIP and accessible buses, are priced by hand, and tourism groups follow their own price list. Every rep had to reach the same price for the same ride, and Egged Plus had to be able to change its prices without a developer.

Another key challenge was the shape of a deal. Customers order many rides at once, then change dates, vehicles and stops. Egged Plus also wanted control it had never had: any discount above 3%, on any ride or add-on, should need a manager’s approval, and an approved quote should not change without a new approval.

The third challenge was the handoff. A signed deal had to become dispatch orders in YIT/FleetControl, with drivers assigned and customers informed. Every new customer also had to exist in SAP before work began. Both systems are strict: YIT accepts trips one at a time, and SAP sits behind Egged Plus’s API gateway, secured with Microsoft Entra ID.

Finally, everything had to work in Hebrew, right to left: every screen, document and message. Leads from the website and Google campaigns also had to reach the right rep within minutes.

The hardest part was that a deal doesn’t end with the signature. It has to reach dispatch and finance without anyone typing it again. MLY connected Zoho to SAP and to our dispatch system, and when something fails, we know right away.

— Shlomi Alkalay, Egged Plus

Our Zoho expertise shaped the design from the first workshop. A standard Zoho quote could not hold an Egged Plus deal, so we modelled each deal as a parent quote with one child quote per ride. The parent carries the customer, the contract terms and the totals; each child carries one ride’s route, vehicle, dates and price.

We placed the parent quote under a Blueprint, and rolled each child’s status up into counter fields on the parent. This way the Blueprint lets a deal go to signature only when every ride in it is resolved.

We kept pricing out of code. The engine reads its parameters from configuration records, and seasonal surcharges from a special-dates calendar, so Egged Plus’s team changes prices on its own. To prove the engine matched Egged Plus’s published 2026 price list, we built an offline copy that reproduces production quotes to the agora (1/100 shekel).

For the integrations, we treated SAP and YIT as systems of record with strict rules. Every call in either direction is logged, nothing is retried blindly, and any failure reaches a person instead of disappearing. Because e-mail alone does not always reach a customer, we also added SMS as a second channel for signing links.

We proposed a solution in five parts, each built on standard Zoho capabilities and extended where Egged Plus’s process needed more.

Quoting and pricing. A full-screen Hebrew widget, opened from the Deal, builds the parent quote and then each ride. Every ride is priced live by a cost-based engine written in Deluge, with route distances from a Google Apps Script service. Rides can also be imported in bulk from Excel, and framework agreements lock a price per vehicle for a set period.

Pricing parameters live in records, not in code: diesel price, margins per vehicle and trip type, daily fixed costs. Seasonal surcharges are set on a calendar tab.

Approvals and versions. A discount above 3% anywhere in the deal sends the whole quote tree for approval in one e-mail. The manager approves straight from the e-mail, or opens the quote to reject it and edit each discount in a dedicated widget. Once a quote leaves Draft, client scripts lock it, and a new version copies only the rides that changed.

Contract and signature. Zoho Writer merges the quote into Egged Plus’s contract and sends it through Zoho Sign. The customer also receives the signing link by SMS. A Zoho Sign link expires after two minutes, so the SMS carries a stable Catalyst link that opens a fresh one on each click. A schedule checks signature status every 15 minutes, moves the signed quote forward, and writes the customer’s notes back onto the rides.

From order to dispatch. At approval, a widget collects the five fields SAP needs and opens the customer in SAP. If SAP rejects it, approval is blocked and Egged Plus’s finance team gets an e-mail. In the other direction, invoices and credit limits flow from SAP back into Zoho. Converting the quote creates a sales order with one ride record per vehicle.

Each ride is sent to YIT as a dispatch order in YIT’s XML format. A Catalyst job reads YIT’s work diary four times a day and brings the driver and vehicle back into Zoho. SMS messages keep the customer’s trip contact informed, and a kiosk lets the back office resend a failed message.

Leads. Leads from the website and Google campaigns post to a Zoho REST function. Existing customers go back to their own rep, and new leads are shared by weighted round-robin from a queue that Egged Plus manages itself.

The project was divided into four scopes:

1. Foundation and migration: the data model, with 14 custom modules and one Division field shared by six modules; lead capture and assignment; and the migration of 2,380 accounts and 1,589 contacts, completed on 13 August 2026.
2. Quote to signature: the quote builder, the pricing engine, compound quotes, the Blueprint, discount approval, versions, and contracts through Writer and Sign.
3. Order to dispatch: rides per vehicle and the YIT integration, built in July and switched to live mode on 13–17 August 2026.
4. Finance and refinements after go-live: the SMS signing link (2 September), SAP customer onboarding (14 September), invoices and credit limits from SAP (September), and SMS reliability fixes with a resend kiosk (1 October).

The build started in June 2026, and production went live on 16 August 2026. Every component is kept in source control, with a written deployment runbook for each change (59 so far), and a Zoho sandbox is used for testing. The sales team was trained in three sessions, and about 20 users work in the system today, with more to join.

The educational division, with its vendor catalog, student price simulator and trip management, is built and running in a sandbox ahead of its January 2027 go-live.

Since go-live, Egged Plus’s charter sales run in one system, from the first inquiry to the bus on the road. In the first two months, from 16 August to 21 October 2026 and not counting test records:

• 214 quotes were built, with 662 ride lines.
• 79 contracts were signed through Zoho Sign.
• 169 rides were sent to YIT with no manual entry, each with a YIT trip number. For 99 of them, the assigned driver and vehicle are already back in Zoho.
• 16 new customers were opened in SAP directly from Zoho.
• Since the 1 October fix, all 41 rides that sent an SMS show it as sent. Before the fix, 25 of 48 driver-assignment messages had failed.

For the sales team, prices no longer go out by WhatsApp from memory: every rep gets the same price for the same ride, from parameters Egged Plus controls. For managers, every inquiry and quote is visible, any discount above 3% goes through approval in a single e-mail, and every deal ends with a formal contract the customer signs, usually from a phone. For the first time, Egged Plus can analyze the prices it offered and the deals it closed.

For operations, a signed order becomes rides in YIT with no retyping, and the driver details come back into Zoho. For finance, every new customer reaches SAP with the right data, a failure is caught before work begins, and invoices and credit limits come back from SAP. Management sees the whole chain, from lead to dispatch, in one place.

Today our whole sales team works in one system. A new lead reaches a rep within minutes, the price comes from our own price list, a discount request reaches the manager in a single e-mail, and the customer signs from their phone. Once an order is approved, the rides go straight to our dispatch system, with nothing typed twice. We are excited to continue with MLY as our educational division joins the platform.

— Shlomi Alkalay, Egged Plus