Business Driven Technology 6th Edition by Paige Baltzan

Exercise 30

3Com Optimizes Product Promotion Processes
Product promotions, such as rebates or subsidized promotional items, can serve as excellent marketing and sales tools to drive increased revenues by providing incentives for customers to purchase select items. However, when you are a leading global networking provider like 3Com that serves thousands of channel partners and customers, such promotions must be easily managed and executed.
To gain better control over the creation and execution of its product promotions, 3Com used Savvion's business process automation and management platform to build a web-based system that streamlines the approval and management workflow of product promotions offered to distributors and resellers. "We needed to ensure that our product promotions were attractive to our channel partners while also being manageable in terms of execution," said Ari Bose, CIO at 3Com. "Using Savvion BusinessManager, we were able to quickly put a process in place that speeds approval and enhances awareness of product promotions to generate opportunities for increased revenue."
Promoting Effective Promotions
The Savvion BusinessManager-based promotions system provides significant time and cost savings by replacing former inefficient and uncontrollable email processes. Instead of informally sending promotion ideas around for approval, employees now use the automated system as a centralized location to manage the workflow involved in proposing new promotions and ensuring all needed approvals are in place before promotion details are shared on the 3Com partner and reseller website.
The promotions system automatically routes proposed promotions to each department that is required to sign off on the promotion, including marketing, promotions communications, and claims administration. The streamlined system also immediately notifies all key parties once new promotions are approved, increasing visibility and revenue opportunities through improved communication with 3Com sales representatives, distributors, and resellers.
Adding Muscle to Management
An important feature of the new system is the automatic auditing of each step taken. The company can easily establish an audit trail, increasing accountability as approvals are given. The structured process also ensures that approved promotions are manageable from an administrative perspective.
In addition, the system tracks promotion fulfillment, enforcing associated terms and conditions such as purchasing limits or available supplies-tracking that was previously almost impossible to do, creating numerous management headaches. The promotions system is also integrated with another BusinessManager-developed process that generates special price quotes (SPQs) for 3Com channel partners, creating built-in checks and balances to prevent the approval of an SPQ while a promotion is being offered for the same product.
The system also provides extensive reporting capabilities that 3Com now uses to gain a better understanding of all offered promotions, authorizations, and potential financial impacts. These online reports replace manually created Excel spreadsheets, enabling departments to generate reports on the fly for enhanced strategic planning.
Bottom-Line Benefits
Greater visibility of product promotions is yielding significant opportunities for increased revenue at 3Com. Sales representatives are immediately notified when promotions are approved, improving internal communications and enabling representatives to share promotion details with resellers and distributors more quickly to foster increased sales. Other business benefits delivered by the automated promotions system include the following:
Real-time monitoring features enable 3Com employees to check the status of a promotion's approval at any time.
Greater efficiency in the approval cycle and streamlined communications increase employee productivity, providing significant time and cost savings.
Claims processing is also more effective because of the structured approval process, delivering additional savings.
Increased visibility enables 3Com to reduce reserve spending by having a clearer idea of channel response to each promotion.
Order and efficiency come to previously chaotic manual processes.
How can 3Com use continuous process improvement to become more efficient