Case Study
Abstract

Calva Products, Inc. extends the enterprise by providing customer and product information to their sales personnel in an inexpensive, easy to use, Pocket PC based application.

Company Background

Calva Products, Inc. is a manufacturer/distributor of dairy milk replacement products. They sell approximately 2,000 unique SKUs. Annual sales are approximately $40M. Sales representatives are located throughout the United States and Mexico. (2004 Statistics)

Challenge

Having access to purchasing history and product availability is critical when making customer sales calls. Calva traditionally sent information to the sales personnel via printed reports or MSExcel based reports each week/month. There was a need to increase the quality and frequency of this information. Without having complete and/or up-to-date information, the sales representative would generally take notes of customer questions. The sales representative would either research the answers to questions at a later time or they would call the home office to have a customer service representative research the answers. The first alternative created a delay in responding to the customer, not to mention additional work. The second alternative also created additional work, for both the sales representative and the customer service representative.

Solution

Pocket Brief Application (PBA) was chosen for the following reasons:
  1. Portability (Pocket PC allows user to hold all of their critical information in the palm of their hand)
  2. Ease of Use (user is only two “taps” from answering 80-90% of customer questions)
  3. Current Information (w/in 2-3 minutes, system refreshes all data to include sales history and product information)
  4. Low Cost (per user fee less than $25/month)
  5. Hosted (only requirement is to create access to raw data sets – no additional work for internal IT personnel)
Results
  1. Increased productivity (time savings per sales representative is estimated at 1 hour/day)
  2. More accurate and timely answers to customer questions
  3. Quick adoption (system is easy to use)