• eDirect Sales System
• Service Management System

Customers

1. Otis WHQ, Farmington

The challenge

To provide a tool that would allow users to configure a product, get a price, produce a proposal and place an order in less than 15 minutes.

• Provide Sales representatives with a global, integrated sales tool leading to revenue growth
• Allow the Marketing departments to set prices independently of costs
• Automate, computerize and simplify a number of back-office processes, in order to significantly reduce Sales administration cost and workload
• Provide factories with a global ordering system

The solution

The key constraints currently limiting sales efficiency are order errors, lengthy order processing times, and cost-based pricing. ESS eliminates these constraints by coordinating operations among sales representatives, CLCs, suppliers, distribution centers, field supervisors, and job sites. The system provides this coordination across all locations, accommodating all languages and local process issues.

ESS consists of three modules:

1. System Administration
2. Product Administration
3. Sales Force Automation

Control of the User Level Modules is handled within the System Administration Module. The functions of System Administration module include defining system level settings, setting up employee and office information, defining permissions, setting up reference information, setting up translation features etc.

Product administration consists of defining the products, defining the product selections and associated technical rules. It also includes defining product costs and rules for deriving these costs. Product Administration module provides an elaborate mechanism for changing product definitions and costs and distributing the changes in a controlled fashion.

This module provides all the functions required by the sales representatives for their day-to-day activities. This includes managing Account (customer) information, managing contact information, managing project information, managing proposal information, creating specifications for the units, generating proposal estimates, generating proposal/tender documents, tracking proposal status, ordering to factories, etc.

ESS virtually eliminates order errors; the system stores all equipment attributes and specifications, and automatically checks all orders to ensure that there are no conflicts or unworkable configurations. To reduce the time required to configure a unit, ESS enables countries to define favorites-standard configurations of product options and specifications-that sales representatives can use or modify as required.

The current cost-plus-margin pricing system is slow, unreliable, and often results in prices that are not in line with market conditions. ESS, on the other hand, enables marketing to apply a detailed market analysis to the process, yielding a feature prices list (with built-in margins) that enable sales representatives to automatically configure and price products far more responsively.

Since ESS automates much of the sales and order cycle, it enables sales representatives to propose-and sell-more units. At the same time, the system reduces the amount of sales support required, speeding the cycle and reducing its cost. In addition, the system allows the sales rep to control the customer from prospect to award without handing off the project to anyone, avoiding a common source of delay.

In addition, ESS generates reports on subjects such as sales activity, forecasts, and installation efficiency, giving sales, supply, and field management considerable visibility into future trends and developments.

• Completely web enabled application based on Windows DNA architecture, uses N-tier design.
• Supports multi-lingual, multi-currency features.
• Provides elaborate security mechanism to provide right access to right people.
• Excellent, rich and intuitive UI for easy navigation.
• Powerful reporting tool for customized reports.
• System provides support for e-mail intimations for critical tasks and activities.
• Hierarchical data representation possible for projects.
• Easy and powerful searching mechanism provided throughout the system.
• Uses data replication for facilitating distributed implementation architecture, if required.

The platform

Windows 2000, MS SQL Server 2000, IIS, MTS, ASP, XML/XSL, Jscript, VBScript, ASP .Net, VB .NET, VB 6.0