Pearson Packaging Systems Builds Custom Applications on Force.com, Dramatically Improves Quoting

"We’ve made Salesforce a strategic part of our business. Force.com allows us to aggressively expand the level of functionality we are using and achieve our goals of extending Salesforce throughout our entire organization."


Challenge
  • Pearson Packaging Systems, a leader in the secondary packaging machinery industry, has complex sales cycles that require accurate quotes for custom-manufactured equipment.
  • The company wanted to automate its manually intensive quote process.
  • Pearson also needed to integrate a legacy ERP application with its Salesforce CRM system.
  • In addition, the company wanted to provide access to customer equipment detail for post-sales service.
  • The elimination of expensive maintenance costs related to disparate legacy systems was key.

Solution
  • The company chose Force.com over .NET and J2EE for rapid development, innovation, and the potential of cloud computing.
  • Pearson decided to use the Force.com platform to build a custom application to automate its post sales service process. The application, which took 90 days to build, gives service reps access to custom asset data via a custom link in Salesforce.
  • Pearson also automated its quotation process by integrating the Big Machines product configuration solution. This application was deployed to 1,100 users, 900 of them new users.
  • Pearson integrated configured products including pricing, component, and real-time cost data with Salesforce.

Results
  • Sales representatives can create quotes for prospects and customers directly within Salesforce in less than 5 minutes, down from over 1 hour with its previous Microsoft Word-based solution.
  • Force.com enabled Pearson to reduce sales training time while increasing productivity.
  • The new post-sales service program successfully enables service reps with key customer asset data.
  • With Force.com, forecast accuracy has improved by 50 percent.
  • Lead follow-up rates have doubled. In addition, the company has seen significant improvement in customer response time.
 
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