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| Case Study |
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BPM helps leading wireless networking product
company automate Special Pricing process |
Leveraging BPM best practices, Patni helped a leading manufacturer automate its special
pricing process enabling it to price its products competitively.
The Client
The client is the leading manufacturer of wired and wireless networking products for home and small business users.
The Challenge
In its effort to drive more responsiveness among channel partners and
customers, the client had initiated several "Special Pricing" initiatives.
These initiatives were driven by sales channel managers who were
responsible for different delivery channels and product categories. Based
on market scenarios driven by competition or availability of excess
inventory, the sales channel managers typically initiated special pricing
requests. These requests were then routed through to respective
approvers, who considered multiple variables for approving or
disapproving the request. Typical variables considered were existing
relationship with the customer, value of deal, potential growth of the
account, level of inventory held and special scenarios such as sunsetting of
specific products.
As the process of approval was manual and involved a series of steps, the
client was losing out on opportunities caused due to long turnaround times.
Communication too was done in an unstructured manner, with e-mail being
the common mode of collaboration. Standard pricing data was fetched
from a JD Edwards ERP system, pasted in an Excel sheet and routed to the
respective approver.
This mode of communication was difficult to track and trace, and made it
difficult for the organization to prioritize requests from an organizational
perspective. There was also a lack of visibility into the number of special
pricing requests making it difficult for stakeholders from other
departments like finance, forecasting, and production to coordinate their
activities. From a top management perspective, it was extremely difficult
to collect information to analyze and improve special pricing process
performance.
To address these issues, the client decided that it needed to automate and
track the entire process of its special pricing initiative.
This assessment exercise called for the expertise of a service provider
who had expertise in aligning the technology strategy with business
needs.
The Solution
Working in close collaboration with the client, the team from Patni initially assessed the
business requirements and the business processes in place. Based on the findings of the
assessment, Patni partnered with the client to define, model, deploy and monitor the endto-
end special pricing process using a BPM suite from Savvion.
The Patni BPM ROI framework was used to measure the tangible business benefits that could
be obtained by adopting this solution. Patni was also able to leverage BPM implementation
accelerators - a set of pre-built components to speed up development time. This included
components typically required for a BPM implementation such as approval workflows and
UIs, task scheduling algorithms, and adaptors for leading ERPs like SAP and JD Edwards.
The solution also integrated with a backend ERP for retrieving
standard pricing data and enabled approvers to compare this data
with the special pricing data. The solution also enabled process
owners to assign tasks to specific people, and track the progress of a
request through different stages. In case of pending action, the
solution triggered alerts to respective people who were assigned the
tasks - escalating the request to the next level till the request was
resolved.
The Technology |
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BPM Suite: Savvion
BusinessManager |
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OS / App Server: Sun
Solaris / Pramati
Application Server |
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Database: Oracle 9i |
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ERP: JD Edwards.
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The Benefits
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Significant reduction in time taken for processing special
pricing requests: As the entire process of the special pricing
initiative starting from initiation to approval is automated, the
client has been able to achieve a significant reduction in the time
taken for processing special pricing requests Additionally, the
solution allows for prioritization of special pricing requests |
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Improved decision making ability: The solution offered business
users visibility into running processes and ability to define and
track KPIs for the special pricing process. This visibility enabled
the client to improve its decision-making ability |
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Enhanced Agility: The solution is flexible enough to support
business process change without requiring extensive
development effort |
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Compliance with regulatory requirements: The solution
provided audit trails and policy enforcement features that
helped the client enable compliance with Sarbanes Oxley
regulations. |
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