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THE PROBLEM: Casio Computer Company;
know worldwide for its vast product category of watches,
pocket computers, musical instruments and other electronic
products. Like other electronic companies, Casio has allocated
considerable portion of the company resources in innovate
development to maintain their competitive edge in the market.
They have invested millions in business applications to allow
the sales force to build a strong hold in the market. However,
the Casio Europe office business system was only available to
the sales work force when they were in the office or at home
and depended heavily on paper based work processes.
The Casio sales personals felt that
they did not have the ideal work processing system to face the
customers with the very information they needed to make sales.
Although, the sales work force at the UK subsidiary used a
simple order processing system on a PDA, it had only limited
capabilities of information flow and was regarded as an
inflexible system. The German division had no electronic
ordering system at all and completely relied on faxes and
telephone calls. Field sales personals made their rounds with
bulky printouts containing customer information. In addition,
internal sales managers lacked a user-friendly interface to
the company’s business systems, forcing them to wade through
multiple levels of data to find information on a specific
territory, product, sales rep or customer.
THE SOLUTION: Japanese Computer
Services (JCS) introduced an advance mobile application
system, ‘MACS’ that intends to provide the Casio’s sales work
force with ubiquitous, real-time access to the company’s core
business applications and data. As stated by John Hargreaves,
Technical Consultant at Japanese Computer Services (JCS)
“Customer dissatisfaction turns
potential sales into lost sales, and that was the risk for
Casio. Sales representatives had limited functionality to
support the timely delivery of information and service that
customers demanded, and Casio’s competitors were waiting in
the wings to fill the void. Our challenge was to quickly
deliver a solution that would help Casio close more
sales.”
To achieve its goals, JCS
implemented a new IT infrastructure for Casio that seamlessly
connects the company’s external and internal business
processes. The new solution intends to provide the sales work
force with critical product, pricing and client information at
every point of the customer chain. When meeting with
customers, sales personals can check inventory levels and
pricing, generate purchase orders, and queue completed order
forms for direct processing that afternoon when they return to
the office. They can also review credit histories, update
their customers on order shipping status, and offer discounts
tailored for specific customers or territories. If selling
multiple product lines, sale reps can easily switch among the
relevant data with a few clicks. In addition, the solution
allows sales managers to easily track sales targets and
revenues generated by day, week or year.
Mike Howells, National Sales Manager
at Casio UK comments on the success of the system “ I always
felt that the old system (MOES) we were using was quite
inadequate for a technological advanced company like Casio. We
would see other companies using mobile computers and we were
still doing things by hand….so I was worried what impact it
would have on us and on the overall image of the company….and
when the division decided to implement MACS I was pleased that
we were going in the right direction because it was good for
the company……..there was a need.”
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