Apttus — Configure, Price, Quote Never Leaving Salesforce or Office
This post is part of an occasional series on the AppExchange as Salesforce.com celebrates the seventh anniversary of its launch. The series will focus on some of the most interesting AppExchange applications of the last year.
Apttus has the kind of solutions that the AppExchange and Force.com were made for. The company has been successful at building applications in Force.com that leverage the Salesforce user interface and that behave as if Salesforce developed them. Apttus calls its applications “100% Native Force.com” and they are but they go well beyond Salesforce to integrate other major solutions too.
Apttus has staked out a position in the quote-to-cash business process covering CPQ applications — Configure, Price, Quote and Contract Management — a niche populated by other Salesforce partners, too. But where Apttus has distinguished itself is in how it has implemented its solutions, by enabling Salesforce business processes and controls inside Microsoft Office, through its X-Author technology..
Early on, the company’s leadership realized that the processes they were automating all had significant inputs from Microsoft Office products and that salespeople and others involved in the sales process, spent significant parts of their workflow outside of Salesforce CRM. For many companies configuring solutions involved Excel spreadsheets and contracts were almost exclusively written and edited with Microsoft Word. These and other documents had to be socialized among sales, finance and executive management and often the manual business processes involved slowed down business.
This meant that significant and important documents for any deal lived outside of Salesforce and data and documents were scattered around an organization on various hard drives where they were vulnerable to loss. Version control was an obvious issue as was the need for executive collaboration. A sales manager might have to approve a configuration’s pricing and various levels of executive management might have to collaborate on contract terms and conditions, for instance. But without a social interface such as Chatter for these participants, the workflow was manual and slow.
Most of the collaboration was taking place semi-manually with meetings and phone calls, very little enterprise control or tracking and there was no repository for multiple contributions. These processes tended to take longer than necessary, which is never good when a deal is pending, especially near the end of a reporting period. So Apttus invented X-Author technology.
X-Author accomplishes two key things for users: It enables all activity in Microsoft Office documents and Outlook to be shared and fully recorded inside Salesforce, and it enables any Salesforce enterprise process or control to be executed from within Microsoft Office products. A user in Salesforce CRM can work and collaborate on a deal’s configuration and contract without leaving Microsoft Office. X-Author is an application built inside the Microsoft Office ribbon that makes it possible to go back and forth between applications, all within Office and to store all deal data including configurations, contracts and Chatter streams all within Salesforce making it the single source of the truth.
X-Author is an enterprise grade application because it brings together several critical applications that have their greatest impact in a complex sales cycle involving many inputs. The company’s customer list bears this out with names like, American Express, Dell, General Electric, Forbes, Delta Airlines, Google and many others.
X-Author for Chatter is also a great example of a serendipitous application that you might expect from a resource like the AppExchange. It is an application that few people would think of but which upon seeing it many people would think is intuitively obvious. That a SaaS application like Salesforce CRM would need access to the functionality in Microsoft Office is clear but how to accomplish the combination had eluded many people. A proof point for this are five pending patents for the company.
Apttus has more than three hundred customers including sixty in the Fortune 500.representing more than 350,000 users. While still a relatively small company it is much larger than its competitors in the CPQ and Contract Management markets and its orientation toward bringing together disparate solutions like Salesforce and Office suggests the company has a bright future.
The Hacking War
We’ve been avoiding or at least minimizing comment on the latest round of computer hacking allegedly by a special unit of the Chinese Army. However as stories have flowed in the New York Times, like this one, it is abundantly clear that the Chinese have been hacking into many of the organizations that our democracy and western economies require to operate.
The Times has done a good job of analyzing the problem and cites a reticence by many corporations to come out publicly to admit to the world that they’ve been hacked and valuable intellectual property taken. The reasons are obvious and unfortunately they articulate the old saw about boiling a frog. Many victims see themselves as unique and fear the consequences of exposing the bully — including consequences of irate shareholders who would blame them and demand a scalp. In the best traditions of courageous journalism, the Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have all come forward to say they’ve been hacked.
Probable headquarters of People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398.
In some cases the hacking goes on for many months and some organizations have let the hackers do their business to understand what the hackers are looking for and to better help them trace the intrusion back to a city block off Datong Road in Shanghai, China. There sits a twelve story building housing People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, which does the hacking. The Chinese government has denied everything.
What’s interesting to me is the partial list published in the Times which includes “the International Olympic Committee, Exxon Mobil, Baker Hughes, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chesapeake Energy, the British energy giant BG Group, the steel maker ArcelorMittal and Coca-Cola.”
Look at all the oil companies in the sample. Another list could easily show tech providers like Intel, Google, Adobe and others. I think each hacking incident has its own rationale. The newspapers were hacked by the Chinese Army looking for dissident sources used by reporters in unflattering stories. One hot storyline has been about the corrupt connections between new Chinese leaders with the government trying to shut down criticism. The same was true of Google when the Chinese went after Gmail looking for email addresses of the same dissidents.
As bad as all that seems, the energy companies have my attention. It should be noted, with the vast majority of crude being controlled by national oil companies that the primary source of information about crude oil should come from the nationals themselves. Surely they could be hacked. But not so fast.
Back in the 1990’s all of OPEC did some fancy bookkeeping on their proven reserves sitting in the ground. Everyone roughly doubled the estimates of reserves they had without lifting a finger to drill another well or to do anything to actually find oil. This was prospecting on the balance sheet, shady bookkeeping. A few intrepid souls called bullpucky on the doubling but back in the 1990’s oil was cheap, the North Sea was producing at accelerating rates and casual market watchers could easily believe the fiction that there was a heck of a lot of oil in the ground.
Twenty years came and went and the North Sea is slowing down. Meanwhile the supply of crude is very tight — that’s why we’re paying nearly $4 per gallon today. If oil really were abundant relative to demand the price at the pump would be a more 1990’s-ish buck a gallon.
So, back to the Chinese. They know supply is tight and they have a vested interest in keeping the oil flowing into their expanding economy. Understanding the supply side is important to them because they have a centrally planned economy and they make demand decisions based on realistic supply options. The alternative is to brace for war which all governments do all the time. I am not the first to refer to the hacking as cyber war and it’s an apt description.
There has been an open door policy between western governments and the oil producers — Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton after all and W. was a wildcatter. So the U.S. government has always had multiple good sources of information on what has been going on. Not so the Chinese. Which gets us back to hacking.
While hacking into someone else’s computer systems is not to be condoned, the bigger point is that the intellectual property — even the knowledge of production rates, their declines and proven reserves — is critical to keeping the economy functioning. It is interesting, to say the least, that our emerging adversary has such a keen interest in this information and that our free society is so blasé about it and its implications.
Salesforce Kickoff
Salesforce is kicking off its new year with an event on Tuesday at New York’s fabled Waldorf Astoria in which CEO Marc Benioff will introduce a refinement of an idea he’s been talking about for many months.
For a long time the company has been using messaging about the idea of transforming the enterprise from a late twentieth century, post-manufacturing model to one more focused on the customer. The new messaging will define what it means to be a “customer organization” and while I have no details, I expect that will mean a strong dose of not only the company’s trademark social media infused CRM but most importantly, a focus on a new model. The model should have much to do with applying social technologies in novel ways to existing business processes and to inventing new applications.
Salesforce has behaved much differently from its competition from its inception more than a decade ago. With social technology, it appears to be focused on what I have been calling its “Blue Ocean Strategy” for a long time. But where I have been applying the term to what Salesforce has been doing, I think Salesforce will now be telling its peers and much larger companies, that they can and should do the same thing. Naturally, it will position itself as the leader that can companies with this important transition.
It makes sense. If you look at the companies that Salesforce has enlisted in pilot projects — Toyota, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Burberry’s, and many others — you see a smattering of some very large, sophisticated technology users that take a certain amount of pride in being first adopters. In this case, while customers will certainly benefit from new approaches to customer outreach, the companies themselves will also benefit from improved interactions and the invention of new business approaches mediated by Salesforce’s advanced technology.
The way Salesforce usually introduces a theme is to announce direction and technology at Dreamforce, its annual user conference held in San Francisco in the fall. I am not sure if this is a departure or more of a continuation of the themes announced at last year’s Dreamforce. Regardless, the company is meticulous about hitting the market with multiple iterations of messaging — usually stating direction and then delivering technology on time as promised and finally reminding the market of the advance.
Salesforce has been using a winter event in New York for many years as a way to set direction and this continues its pattern though this may be the most important announcement the company has made in a while.
I have not been briefed yet on the announcements but I have been invited to the event in New York and will report from there and include my analysis of it all on Wednesday and Thursday.
Zapier — Quick and Clean Web Services Integration
This post is part of an occasional series on the AppExchange as Salesforce.com celebrates the seventh anniversary of its launch. The series will focus on some of the most interesting AppExchange applications of the last year.
If Zapier didn’t exist someone would have had to invent it because the service it provides is that critical to many small businesses. The easiest way to think about Zapier is as an integration company for Web services, kind of a mashup on demand. This small company of fewer than ten full time employees, doing business on the AppExchange, acts as part of the glue that brings together AppExchange apps with other web services. Working with the AppExchange API set, Zapier produces integrations — that they call “Zaps” — for more than 160 web services.
Zapier has produced more than 25,000 integrations and though not all of these integrations involve Salesforce, many do. The company boasts more than 1,500 Salesforce customers — many with multiple Zaps — as users with more than two hundred using Zapier to integrate web seervices with Desk.com, Salesforce’s help desk solution for the small business market.
Zaps or mashups couldn’t be easier to make using Zapier. There is no coding to deal with and a user can create a Zap in a browser screen by simply dragging and dropping the relevant product icons and choosing pre-built actions. And just to make sure the result is what you really want, an English version of the mashup is displayed right on the screen. For instance, “When a New Subscriber in Campaign Monitor occurs, Zapier will automatically Create a Lead in Salesforce.” That’s it and there’s no limit to the number of Zaps a user can make between products.
The SMB space is where Zapier does its best work. In addition to Salesforce CRM, the company has integrations ready to go with a variety of services that small businesses (and some large ones) can readily take advantage of such as ecommerce, email marketing, billing, accounting and invoicing and sentiment analysis and more — 23 categories and growing. The actions and their triggers are coded by Zapier and delivered as standard components.
Not long ago a company needed to have significant resources to enable it to coordinate activities between so many diverse applications and web services but that’s changed. Zapier, like all services on the AppExchange is a SaaS solution and the company has four pricing plans starting with a freemium and topping out at $99 per month for a company. Zapier has so far grown more or less organically deciding which products it integrates with through customer requests. Zapier is happy to take customer suggestions and offers a place on its site to make this possible.
Many enterprises using Salesforce CRM will have more traditional integrations with other applications. But Zapier serves a growing market of small companies that need to bring together best of breed solutions through simple integrations at very low cost. The Zapier model works well in this area and serves to breakdown barriers between important web services and potential customers. It’s a great example of a long tail solution — something that may not have huge market appeal but which is a perfect fit for many customers. The AppExchange provides a niche for Zapier by providing a ready clientele and a streamlined sales and marketing process.
TOA Technologies Helps Manage the Rolling Workforce with Predictive Modeling
This post is part of an occasional series on the AppExchange as Salesforce.com celebrates the seventh anniversary of its launch. The series will focus on some of the most interesting AppExchange applications of the last year.
TOA Technologies is an AppExchange partner focusing on mobile workforce management, which provides an important extension to the Salesforce CRM solution set. In the early days of CRM the category went by a different name — field service automation or FSA — which better reflected the fact that until then, most of the work we now associate with deploying and directing field service personnel was manual.
While the initial automation efforts delivered many benefits, including reduced costs and greater productivity, those benefits have been largely absorbed and companies today are seeking greater refinement in a new set of benefits. That’s where TOA Technologies comes in.
From automation to management
TOA has taken field service the next logical step from automation to management, which requires greater use of information. The information that TOA leverages comes from collecting copious amounts of time related data and then analyzing it to derive performance metrics. These metrics enable TOA to render accurate predictions for a business focused on dispatching people and equipment to customer sites as well as internal business sites that may require services or deliverables. The result is better customer experience from better knowing when to expect the service call and how long it will take.
TOA has a two-step approach to analyzing and predicting mobile workforce activity. For each company it has helped since its founding in 2003, TOA uses predictive analytics based individual profile patterns to optimize each unique workforce.
First, TOA collects time-based measurements about each member of a mobile workforce and the way that each completes different types of work. Then, TOA’s ETAdirect software uses this learned information to make predictions about when appointments will occur and how long they will take. Because these predictions are based on actual, real-time information, organizations can effectively communicate appointment information to customers, with the confidence the field workforce will deliver on the service promise. Because the system learns based on information unique to the individual and organization, it takes five days, on average, to learn the patterns of a given workforce in a way that generates results. , on average, to learn the patten waesu yding next steps with John/Yuvalconsumption)of day Thursday. ability However, the solution still achieves incredible efficiencies and results on day one, because TOA can input previously collected industry data (from its expertise in the industry) or apply basic patterns or knowledge provided by the organization. Therefore, the technology can optimize schedules for a good starting point even before it collects data from the field.
The customer’s time is money
The focus on time and efficiency is more important now than ever before because in today’s more competitive markets, customer satisfaction, and not cost, has become a focal point. Customers have choices in who they do business with and if a product fails to measure up a customer might go elsewhere. But in today’s more competitive marketplace the service experience goes under the same microscope and if a service experience fails to measure up it can also be reason for customer attrition. TOA’s secret sauce is its understanding that a focus on time efficient processes results in both cost containment for the vendor and greater reliability and a better customer experience.
So, by capturing data that enables the system to accurately predict how long it takes to perform a repair or move a truck from one customer location to another at a particular time of day, a service vendor can more accurately predict a service window and detect any slippage in the schedule. Predictive scheduling enables the vendor to promise a smaller service window for the customer, freeing up the customer’s time in the process. This is one reason that TOA has been selected by several cable providers, telcos and pay TV providers including Dish Network, Cablevision, Cox Communications and Virgin Media.
Salesforce connection
TOA Technologies has more than ninety enterprise class customers and more than 66,000 users of its solutions. At any time there are more than seventy thousand mobile assets actively tracked by the system. ETAworkforce, TOA’s integration suite, which went live on the AppExchange in mid-2012, brings together Salesforce CRM and field service management powered by TOA. ETAworkforce also enables customer service representatives (CSRs) in the call center to book appointments the way a traveler might book a flight, as well as create work orders — all within the Salesforce ecosystem. This was impossible before ETAworkforce was available.
Benefits
ETAdirect predicts how the unpredictable events that occur daily in any field service delivery will impact the rest of the day, thus empowering the organization to see and manage problems before they occur. According to Vice President Of Channels and Alliances, Jeff Wartgow, “TOA’s ETAdirect solution manages 75 million appointments per year. Also, “Any industry that requires having a service person arrive on site, and on time,” is a candidate for the TOA system including furniture delivery, retail and home healthcare to name a few.
Tracking time is a great way to improve customer satisfaction and save money. Because TOA tracks data rigorously, it’s easy to come up with its own performance averages a representative sample includes:
- Reduction of service wait window to one hour
- 30 percent improvement in on-time performance and 98 percent customer satisfaction rate
- 70 percent reduction in “Where’s My Service/Delivery?” calls to the call center
- 47 percent increase in the rate of jobs completed each day
- 40 percent decrease in miles driven per appointment
- 20 percent reduction in time to complete jobs
- 20 percent reduction in unnecessary visits to a customer home
- 75 percent reduction in overtime
Conclusion
As long as there are reasons to bring products and services to customers there will be a need to manage costs and expectations to deliver optimal customer service experiences. TOA Technologies has shown an understanding of what’s critically important in servicing customers at their locations. It’s understanding what happens in the field, down to the individual employee, and using that information to predict when things will happen and how long they will take. Managing time has enabled TOA to elevate the discussion from service automation to real service management.
