Profit concepts is always looking for the next big thing. The integrator makes a healthy living building J.D. Edwards solutions. But in 1999, the company was hungry to try something new. That's when Profit Concepts launched a CRM practice to cash in on the booming market for Siebel Systems applications.
Today, Profit Concepts and its CRM spin-off, known as Intesol, are solving cross-application business problems that many integrators simply can't address.
Just ask Polar Air Cargo, one of Profit Concepts' most prized accounts. Founded in 1993, Polar Air rapidly grew by filling voids in the scheduled air cargo services that US carriers offer to international destinations. Today, the company's 15 Boeing 747s link commerce centres in Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas.
Now, for the bad news. Because of an antiquated sales-tracking system, Polar Air often sold cargo space for pennies on the dollar. Much of the discounting involved eleventh-hour customer orders. Sometimes space was filled with discounted cargo when it could have been filled with higher-profit orders, says Scott Dolan, Polar Air's VP of quality.
Unfortunately, remote sales reps couldn't access a centralised Unisys VIS 1 air-bill tracking system at Polar Air's headquarters. Without real-time access to the tracking system, sales reps couldn't determine how close a customer was to meeting volume discount milestones, earlier volume commitments, and so on. Sales reps actually had to phone requests for customer histories to Polar Air's IT department and await faxed reports.
Contents
Integrating CRM and ERP | |
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First contact | |
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Pasting front to back | |
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Lessons learned | |
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