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EPAM Success Story - Colgate-Palmolive
A Global Customer Relationship Management Initiative Leads to Increased Sales Productivity and Enhanced Customer Service
Colgate-Palmolive, a $9 billion company, markets products around the world under such recognizable brands as Colgate, Palmolive, Ajax, Fab, and Mennen as well as Hill's Science Diet and Hill's Prescription Diet.
Situation
To compete and win in today's global economy, corporations have to move data swiftly and seamlessly across broad networks. To help sales representatives manage a large portfolio of customers, products, and promotional material, Colgate wanted an application that provided on-demand real-time information to every sales person in distributed office environments in 30 countries. To accomplish this, Colgate realized that a sophisticated sales-support system, capable of disseminating data to multiple users and running a variety of databases on multiple hardware platforms, would be required.
Solution
The solution was Colgate's Global Sales Support System, a proprietary mobile application, code named LISA2. Developed by EPAM, LISA2 not only accomplished the real-time information requirement, but also saved costs by replacing the global paper mailing of tens of thousands of product updates and reports each month. The system provides sales people with enterprise, customer, product, availability, promotional, order status, and reporting information. With a laptop computer, a sales person is able to collaborate with internal contacts, manage customer calls, manage and track sales goals, tap a product encyclopedia (including complex promotional pricing), enter and monitor orders, and analyze sales data and enter and process orders on-line with no processing delays.
System Highlights
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Ability for the traveling sales representative to work off-line with all necessary information to do their job well. |
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Easy dial-up/intranet connection to update information with just-in-time, two-way data exchange with sales support sub-systems. |
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Integration with SAP R/3 enterprise and other host information systems. |
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Localization; multi-currency, order tracking, and multi-language support. |
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Re-usable, components-based architecture leveraged in 30 countries for localization and enables easy replacement or upgrade of any component. |
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Flexible System Setup that supports a variety of localization parameters as well as several technical platforms. |
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Intuitive graphical user interface streamlines navigation and provides a drill-down capability for accessing the right level of information to. |
Results
Colgate-Palmolive has seen its sales force become more efficient and effective, especially in dealing with multiple languages, currencies, and promotions. The sales force shows higher morale and greater productivity as a result of improved accuracy and the variety of tools and options that enhance their product knowledge and improve their productivity. More than $4 billion in sales flow through the system each year, making the LISA2 one of the most mission critical systems at Colgate.
"Having a flexible system in place globally has allowed us to be more responsive to new business demands. More importantly, with competitive pricing pressures increasing due to the formation of the European Community the bottom line must be followed more closely than ever before. We can confidently say that we are running our sales organization as productively as possible".
Stefan Ziehrer,
Head of Colgate Sales Support Competence Center, Germany
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