Customer Success Profile

Holophane Corporation
After more than 100 years in business, Newark, Ohio-based Holophane Corporation knows that making customers happy is vital to the success of its business. Holophane has built a $200 million annual revenue base by being a leading international manufacturer and marketer of premium quality, highly-engineered lighting fixtures and systems for a wide range of industrial, commercial and outdoor applications. Much of their success is directly attributable to the work of Holophanes direct sales team, which is known within their industry for their work in providing customized lighting design and product assistance in creating lighting solutions based on unique customer needs. that a flexible customer relationship management technology would significantly improve the way they operated. Although Holophanes strength has always been in its ability to mass customize its products, complexity and time consuming bottlenecks in the order entry cycle contributed to manufacturing errors, reschedules, expedites and excessive handling of information and paperwork. This resulted in more than one-third of orders being sent back for clarification and 52 percent of ordering requiring changes after order entry. Making those changes was expensive and timeconsuming as well as being frustrating for Holophanes customers. To find a way through this challenge, Holophane turned to Pivotal. Following a phased implementation to over 250 mobile and LAN users, Holophane now reports that its has cut the number of orders requiring changes after entry by 18 percent, reduced order clarification delays by 44 percent, saved money by reducing the total number of orders expedited through manufacturing by 6 percent and allowed its sales staff to spend more time with customers building longterm business relationships. One key to the success of this implementation was the way that Pivotals solution could support the integration of additional applications important to the customer relationship management process. In this case, sales configuration software called Enact Selector was integrated with Pivotals solution in order to seamlessly pass configured quotation line items between its customer quotation and production manufacturing databases. Stang says the flexibility and power of Pivotal is

44%
REDUCED ORDER CLARIFICATION DELAYS BY 44%
Holophane realized that if the company was to grow on average of 10 percent annually, it was going to have to make some significant changes in the way it operated. According to Douglas J. Stang, the Manager of Holophanes Information Services Department, the company mapped out its current and ideal sales and order processing steps and concluded

making a huge difference to his business across the entire sales cycle. We are very happy with our progress, Pivotal has been a critical factor in our success to date, says Stang. Pivotals solution has allowed us to get a more complete view of our customers and our business activity by creating centralized project information. It allows us to pull information about our customers, our products and our projects into our central office all departments work out of the same file. The system can also push information out to our field sales force and to our customers on the diversity of products that we can build for them.

mation about new product variations were not always effectively communicated to the field. Product education is a critical factor to generate technical sales of new product offerings quickly, he adds. Sales training on an extensive and expanding product line is time consuming, and requires better tools and technical information to ensure that products were being configured correctly. We determined that accuracy, early in the process, would speed order acceptance, product manufacturing and order fulfillment. That is why Holophane turned to Pivotal.

SAVING TIME, MONEY AND IMPROVING SERVICE

Through the implementation of Pivotals solution over the past year along with a new configuration system and a number of internal process changes, Stang reports that Holophane is already enjoying huge benefits over a year ago. He says change orders have been reduced 18 percent, while so-called dirty orders (i.e. those awaiting order clarification) have been reduced by more than 44 percent. The Pivotal solution allows us to all work off the same page and identify areas where we can improve our service to our customers and improve our order processing so we can get the product out the door faster. With these improvements, the quantity of orders processed through our systems has increased 25 percent with no additional staffing in support departments.

FINDING A BETTER WAY TO SERVE CUSTOMERS

With a broad product line, Holophane works closely with the construction specification community to design lighting solutions to meet a specific project need. Trained and experienced field sales personnel are essential drivers to the companys business operation and are critical to all facets of Holophanes sales process. The sales force has to know its markets and customers and be able to react to their needs and create very specific solutions to meet them. As a just-in-time manufacturer, orders need to be processed quickly and accurately through the company. Any delays in order processing could slow product delivery to our customers, explains Stang. Stang says that infor-

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

PIVOTAL HAS:
> improved internal communications, streamlined Holophanes manufacturing process and the ability to meet customer deadlines through 18 percent fewer change orders. > enabled 44 percent fewer orders requiring clarification before order entry. > expedited orders by 6 percent which reduces the number of production changes required to meet acknowledged customer ship dates. > increased order transactions over 25 percent with the same staffing levels.

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1999 Pivotal Corporation. All rights reserved. The trademarks in this document are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Pivotal Corporation, or are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 07-00-543 Revised: October 1999