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Case Studies

 Owens & Minor

Owens & Minor, Inc., a FORTUNE 500 company, is the leading distributor of medical and surgical supplies to the acute-care market and a leading healthcare supply chain management company.


Client: Owens & Minor
Technology:
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server
Ontolica
Industry: Manufacturing
Service: Enterprise Portal


The Challenge
As with many organizations in the supply chain distribution industry, the Owens & Minor sales organization is dispersed throughout country and constantly on the road. They had to access various resources to obtain all of the information, data or collateral they needed to sell most efficiently and locate the most update sales material from Marketing. This active sales force needed one single location to track sales activity, access the most recently updated sales reports, presentations and collateral and obtain the most recent communications from the home office.


The Solution
 To ensure the Sales team can quickly access the information they need to sell more efficiently, Ironworks worked closely with members of the Sales & Marketing team to identify and define a solution that motivates, empowers and provides value to the sales team. This solution included items such as:
  •  Personalized dashboard with sales performance indicators
  • My Accounts area with graphs and charts displaying snapshots of opportunity and existing account data from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system
  • Newsletter functionality allowing multiple content owners to contribute articles to various newsletter issues
  • An area where sales reps can search a knowledge base of frequently asked questions and submit new questions to subject matter experts for review and publication
  • The development of a relevant taxonomy that would allow users to search and find content easily

Ironworks recommended leveraging Owens & Minor’s current MOSS environment to develop a Sales Portal. The Sales Portal was developed and integrated with the existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM application the sales team uses to manage customer accounts, track opportunities and report new business. Ontolica for SharePoint was installed and configured to provide extensive search capabilities as well as easy-to-use web-parts, delivered within the SharePoint security and permissions structure.



The Results
Now when sales teammates access CRM to update their sales activities, they view the portal within either the context of the web-based CRM application or Outlook so it is always right at their fingertips. The Sales Portal has provided the sales team with the ability to:
  • View personalized web parts displaying their sales rankings and sales performance across multiple parameters informing them at a glance how they stack up against the rest of the sales team
  • Access to colorful graphs and charts that give the sales teammate an overall picture of their potential sales opportunities and those accounts that need additional attention
  • Find the most recently updated presentations, collateral materials, reports  and sales sheets organized by service and solution or document type for sales calls to healthcare providers
  • Search across not only the Sales Portal, but other important Owens & Minor resources by keyword, document type or service
  • Obtain important product updates regarding pricing, backorders and new releases in an easy-to-read, archived and searchable format via custom Newsletter functionality

The Sales Portal allows Owens & Minor’s sales team to increase productivity by eliminating wasted time searching multiple locations for the important data and collateral they need and lets them focus on selling.

At launch, a survey was included on the home page of the Sales Portal. Below are sample responses from Owens & Minor’s sales team when asked what area of the portal they found most helpful: 

“It's difficult to pick just one area. Having all of these in one central area to quickly obtain information will be so convenient.”

“I really liked the Rankings and My Accounts Dashboard. That is extremely helpful!”


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