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Trend Communications
Trend Communications supplies innovative hand-held telecommunications
test instruments for installation and maintenance field engineers. The
high specification products are reliable and easy to use and are
critical to the successful deployment of access and core networks
around the world. Trend continues to develop new products to ensure it
remains the supplier of choice for telecommunications organisations and
their field engineers.Business Challenge
Trend Communications (Trend) have being designing, engineering and manufacturing highly configurable telecommunications hand-held testing equipment for over 25 years. The company has always prided itself on innovation and the delivery of high quality equipment that meets the clients needs specifically. Such a flexible approach to product specification created a significant breakdown in customer service as the then manual procedures for gathering customer requirements and assembling the correct configuration along with availability of parts information led to significant delays in being able to quote accurately both in terms of price and delivery.
In 1995 Trend made a significant investment in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in order to streamline customer requirements, specification and product configuration. The system selected was JBA System 21. After a number of years it became clear to the Trend IT team that they were not going to be able to fully address the 'business needs' and that the configurator element of JBA would have proven too cumbersome to deploy, especially as it was felt that change management would be a huge challenge, post implementation.
Outstanding Business Needs:
- Not being able to see profitability clearly and easily
- Unable to provide responsive customer service
- Inability to manage inventory such that any configuration could be available
- Being unable to provide accurate and timely quotations to customers
- Using high value and cost resources, namely Product Manager to create quotations
- Manual and paper-based systems meant too much knowledge was residing with a few individuals and increasing risk in the business
- Being uncompetitive.
Technical Challenge
Trend has been a long-standing, substantial and innovative user of IBM Domino and Lotus Notes; it provides the communications backbone to the company as well underpinning the costing and pricing engines from Lotus Databases. The Lotus facility resides on a substantial Intel server from HP.
In addition, the company has invested in JBA System 21 as an ERP facility. This solution is running on an IBM AS/400 server. In order for any product configurator to be successfully deployed at Trend it had to be able to interact with both the IBM Lotus Notes solutions as well as the JBA data sources.
The IT team at Trend had a clear idea of the technical requirements and aspects of any solution that would be addressing the needs of the business for configuration, pricing, quotations.
The key attributes would need to include:
- Not requiring huge levels of internal resources to implement
- Integration and manipulation of data
- Maintain data integrity
- Presentation of outputs with a web-browser enabled User Interface, preferably Java
- Speed of implementation and minimum disruption to, or changes made to legacy systems
- Flexibility and adaptability enabling real time responsiveness to the business needs
- Ease of maintenance and change
- Must not be an IT-centric tool-set and something others in the business could be trained to use.
Solution
Following internal evaluation and consultation with Business Users, Trend's IT team began the search for a flexible and affordable software product configurator. Although there were a number of offerings in the marketplace, the majority had high ticket prices and lacked the flexibility that they desired. In 2004, Trend issued an ITT to some fifteen companies from which four were to be short-listed to demonstrate their solutions. The ITT made it clear that Trend wanted a solution that would not end up being an IT-oriented solution, the team wanted a solution that would enable and empower the business users to build the processes and knowledge banks required. Maintenance and change would have to be easy and done 'in-house'.
The successful short-listed companies were invited to attend a 1 day proof-of-concept workshop where they were asked to undertake the task of generating a configurator for one of Trend's products.
Datadialogs presented Eden and was able to demonstrate its integration, application development and process execution prowess within a couple of hours.
"Quite literally, the Datadialogs Consultant arrived at 9.30 and by 11am we had a working model!" Kevin Coxon, IT Manager remarked. "Eden left others on the starting blocks by comparison. It has not only enabled us to configure our products but we were immediately able to see inventory availability, order requirements, discount levels, transaction volumes and most importantly we could calculate profitability accurately. All because Eden could integrate and therefore liberate all our disparate data sources to deliver a meaningful interface for direct sales, distributors and ultimately end-users alike."
Following the 1 day proof-of-concept, Trend engaged with the Datadialogs and put together a 3 day workshop in order to build on the initial concepts and requirements and to gain a greater insight into both the requirements and Eden itself.
"It became very apparent, extremely quickly, that one of Eden's greatest attributes is its ability to handle mission and scope creep in real time!" Kevin Coxon says, "Every time we asked whether we could do 'this' or 'that', the answer was yes and it would appear before our eyes, almost immediately. What is truly remarkable though, is that out-of-the-box Eden was able to plug and play with our installed legacy applications, it was able to cope with the complexity of our requirements from day one without writing code anywhere and ultimately we believe we are running the largest single model amongst Eden's users."
The IT team and the business users were engaged in the project from the outset.
"We did not write any functional specifications; rather, we sat each process owner and product manager down with the Datadialogs consultants and they built their parts of the model together. All their unique knowledge was captured and is re-used day in and day out to the benefit of the whole business."
Result
Trend's IT team have been able to deliver tangible business benefits across Customer Satisfaction, Productivity and vastly improve IT services to its Product Managers.
Quality & Customer Satisfaction
- Faster response to sales enquiries through direct generation of valid quotes for both the Trend Salesforce and Distributors, without dialogues with Product Management.
- Faster booking of Sales Orders
- Reduced order and delivery errors through increased order accuracy, elimination of proposal errors and elimination of errors due to incorrect product data.
- Faster Order Acknowledgment through earlier booking of received orders
- Shorter lead-times through earlier identification of stock shortages.
Productivity
- Salesforce time saved in preparation of quotes and in pre-sales problem-solving with the Product Managers and through the availability of a multi-currency, multi-language quotation tool.
- Product Managers time saved through reduction in pre-sales problem-solving with the Salesforce, elimination of participation in Order-processing and participation in Bill of Material editing.
- Administration time saved through direct matching of Orders with stored Quotes and direct entry of order data to ERP system.
- Less time spent by everyone in cleaning up problems.
"Our Product Managers say that our Eden solution allows them to focus on more aspects of their roles within the business rather than just spending time analysing configurations, validating configurations, approving pricing, margin discounts etc. The whole process is all automatic and all visible to them and it is just simple. They are very happy with it," concluded Kevin Coxon.
About Trend Communications
Trend Communications supplies innovative hand-held telecommunications test instruments for installation and maintenance field engineers. The high specification products are reliable and easy to use and are critical to the successful deployment of access and core networks around the world. Trend continues to develop new products to ensure it remains the supplier of choice for telecommunications organisations and their field engineers.
Trend Communications' products are highly configurable and range in price from £4-5k through to tens of thousands of pounds where they are specified to incorporate third party services and products as well. Clients include BT, Orange, Vodafone, to name a few.
Trend provides solutions for: Local Access, Ethernet, Optical, Datacom, IP and Core Network. The company has subsidiaries in France, Germany, India, Spain, U.K. and U.S. In addition, Trend Communications has appointed more than 30 distributors worldwide.
Trend Communications Limited, alongside Anderson Power Products and Casella Measurement Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of IDEAL Industries Inc.
Trend Communications Ltd
Whitebrook Park
Lower Cookham Road
Maidenhead SL6 8XY, UK
Telephone: 01628 503500
Fax: 01628 503599
E-mail: info@trendcomms.com
Reference
www.trendcomms.com
