Sun and Lotus Provide Sales Force Automation For BCTEL Advanced Communications

Lotus

Sun and Lotus Provide Sales Force Automation For BCTEL Advanced Communications

BCTEL Advanced Communications was formed in 1991 to offer innovative data and video information services to corporate, medical, educational and government organizations through British Columbia. Significant financial investment enabled the development of a province-wide fiberoptic network using ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology to deliver leading edge products and services to business customers.

Today, BCTEL Advanced Communications provides customers throughout the province with leading-edge business solutions which include the design and management of private networks, computer networking capabilities (LAN to LAN management), video conferencing, Internet and electronic commerce services, as well as alliances with Internet Service Providers.

BCTEL Advanced Communications' products and services are highly technical. As a result, the sales cycle and provision of quotations to customers are both very complex an time consuming. The challenge to BCTEL was to make it easier for sales representatives to gather the necessary information required to create quotations and to reduce the sales cycle time. An additional challenge was to reduce the length of time between receipt of the customer's order and delivery of the products and services to the customer.

The solution was to implement workflow processes and technologies to facilitate more efficient exchange of information. Lotus Notes met the requirements and could provide connectivity with existing legacy systems. It had already been used successfully by other BCTEL divisions.

Lotus Notes' rich distributed document storage enables workgroup computing and allows mobile users to be full participants in business processes, whether traveling or working from a remote office. The robust security ensures that only authorized users have access to confidential documents.

"Sun's client-server platform supports Notes' distributed document storage and permits mobile users to be full participants in business processes," says Bill Hasell, Systems Specialist at BCTEL Advanced Communications.

BCTEL Advanced Communications installed Notes for 200 users in a new client-server environment. A Sun SPARCserver 20 with 2 processors, 4 gigabytes of disk space and 96 megabytes of RAM was deployed running Solaris 2.4 UNIX-based operating environment. Another SPARCserver 20 holds and Oracle7 relational database with 96 megabytes of RAM and 8 gigabytes of data storage.

Sun met BCTEL's demands for an open computing environment with a high degree of availability. It offered strong capabilities in TCP/IP networking, scalability and the flexibility to add a number of third party applications. Compatibility with leading edge technologies was also a key factor.

Prior to installing Lotus Notes, sales representatives gathered information for quotations through multiple meetings, telephone calls and memos between internal departments. The process often took many weeks to complete. Sales representatives were taken away from selling and the implementation of the project could not commence until the quotation was finalized and forwarded to Engineering and Operations.

Today, Notes shortens the time and improves the quality of the quoting process. Notes' distributed document databases and integrated messaging system permits the sharing of a quote document among the entire project team at once. Each department can contribute input which then can be instantly viewed and incorporated by others.

"Inputs which used to take a week or more to gather are being completed in 24 hours."

This kind of collaboration was simply not possible before. Quotations are now completed more quickly, providing a competitive edge and better customer service. Greater accuracy minimizes changes during implementation and helps control profit margins.

Once approved by the customer, quotations are transmitted electronically to create a service order. The order is checked and then flows to Engineering and Operations to be built. Notes also passes information to the billing system for customer invoicing and collection.

The SPARCserver and Solaris operating environment from Sun Microsystems offer:

An open architecture which easily supports third party applications such as Lotus Notes
Superior networking capabilities
Scalability
Exceptional value

For BCTEL Advanced Communications, Sun Microsystems and Lotus Development provided superior results at an affordable price and the ability to grow as the company grows.

(C)1996 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo and Solaris are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. SPARCserver is a trademark of SPARC International, Inc. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon the architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. All other products mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners. Printed in Canada 07/96.

Reprinted with permission from Sun Microsystems, Inc.