eCASE STUDY Simpson Strong-Tie Company knows the extremes of mobility— its products are designed to keep things from moving and its worldwide sales force never wants to stop. One extreme features the leading structural building connectors; the other features state of the art mobile devices. Today, Simpson is a growing international company in manufacture and marketing of building products. It leads the timber connector industry around the world with connector sales exceeding $400 million. It needed a market-leading mobile strategy. IT WASN’T WORKING “People just weren’t using the program,” says Gray Drohan, Manager of IT Services at Simpson Strong- Tie. “They’d tell us it was too cumbersome and took too long to execute. It got to the point where they weren’t taking their laptops with them to customer meetings.” The result: valuable call reports and customer information weren’t being filed in a timely manner, hindering sales and the marketing efforts. “Mailing lists were outdated,materials were going to the wrong people—we were spending a lot of money on something that a significant portion of our sales force wasn’t using,” Drohan says. MAKING THE CONNECTION Simpson Strong-Tie standardized on the HP iPAQ Pocket PC 5550 Series which offers 128 MB RAM, a 400MHz Intel Xscale processor, integrated Bluetooth wireless technology and Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Software for Pocket PC (Premium Edition). With the chance to save $250,000 by dropping its business management software vendor, Simpson challenged its in-house programmers to build a call report sized for the iPAQ Pocket PC screen that a salesperson could complete with just a few quick actions. “Our reps can move through it extremely quickly now, and no longer need to write long notes or navigate multiple screens,”Drohan says. An activity that once took as long as 15 minutes can now be done in less than 30 seconds. As soon as sales representatives leave a call, they wirelessly sync the iPAQ with the HP ProLiant servers in the home office and enter their call reports. This immediately updates the system so that the report can be used for marketing, operations and engineering purposes. “The reps have the latest notes and history with them at all times, for all of their contacts. If anything needs to be transmitted there’s an immediate email notification that they receive as soon as they synch—after their next call. In seconds they are updated and ready to go,” concludes Drohan. THE UPSIDE Only after a few weeks, productivity is up. “We have more than 125,000 contacts at 80,000 customers. Just keeping those lists current will save us substantial time and money on mailings to chasing customers who are no longer active,” reports Drohan. For more information, see www.hp.com
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