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

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.