ShoreTel Inc. was facing a problem many companies would love to have — how to cope with exploding demand for its products and services. Sales for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, a supplier of enterprise VoIP telephone solutions, were growing at more than 70 percent per year. However, ShoreTel’s Excel-based order entry and fulfillment system was labor-intensive, lacked scalability, and the high-touch aspect of the process resulted in processing errors. This situation was made even more critical by the fact that ShoreTel sells all of its products and services through channel partners.
Solution:
Clearly, ShoreTel needed a new solution, both for these channel partners and for the internal team. After examining several internal and external solutions, ShoreTel selected a hosted configuration and guided selling solution from BigMachines Inc. of Deerfield, Ill. BigMachines is a provider of on-demand configurator and quoting software solutions that are designed to streamline pricing, system configuration, quoting and ordering processes while enabling collaboration among extended system users.
The Web-based solution integrated well with ShoreTel’s existing IT infrastructure and applications, including its ERP and CRM systems. By centrally hosting the software solution and the supporting IT hardware, BigMachines helps ShoreTel reduce the resources needed to monitor and upgrade the system infrastructure as new BigMachines software is released.
Prior to implementing the BigMachines solution, ShoreTel used BigMachines’ Breakthrough Opportunity Analysis (BOA) process and discovered that its front-end opportunity-to-quote-to-order processes — managed largely by its channel partners — needed to be improved. ShoreTel has more than 400 channel partners worldwide.
ShoreTel realized it needed a system that would guarantee the integrity of its sales processes and pricing, eventually extending all the way to its back-end systems, according to ShoreTel CIO Rick Parkinson. He directs ShoreTel’s strategy and use of technology for internal and external business operations.
Parkinson is responsible for improving ShoreTel’s business scalability and productivity through strategic technology investments, as well as improving channel partner business productivity through the use of ShoreTel technology solutions. When Parkinson joined ShoreTel, a key issue was the Excel quote tool used by channel partners to generate cost estimates and place orders for ShoreTel products for resale to end-users. Orders would come in via e-mail, fax, and regular mail.
