Allegiance Healthcare
Allegiance Healthcare's sales force sells medical and surgical products to hospitals and care continuum providers across the US. Allegiance has implemented a common sales force automation tool called ASPIRE (Allegiance Sales, Pricing & Integrated Reporting), to give its sales representatives the business intelligence to better understand their customers' purchases and to recognize a customer's cost-saving opportunities.
"We are very impressed with Business Objects as our partner for enterprise reporting solutions. New features add up to a product that can be deployed to all levels of users in departments throughout Allegiance."
Mark Ciekutis,
Data Warehouse Manager,
Allegiance Healthcare.
The creation of ASPIRE was part of a larger business systems overhaul implemented by Allegiance called the "HORIZON Project." Allegiance decided to replace all of its key business systems with a SAP R/3 system for managing data and to build a separate decision-support data warehouse that would integrate with one reporting system built with BusinessObjects.
This entire implementation qualifies as the largest installation of automation in the healthcare industry and allows Allegiance to differentiate itself from other medical product providers by improving efficiencies in order management and information sharing for its 70,000 customers and 2,000 suppliers. By extending their enormous investment in HORIZON to develop a sales force automation component, Allegiance is opening the door to having its sales representatives work more closely with customers to better understand their expenses and ultimately improve their business practices.
How Does it Work?
Every month, a sales representative's territorial data is extracted from Allegiance's data warehouse and downloaded to his or her laptop computer. Data marts are then created that show sales and pricing data about their territories. Using ASPIRE, sales representatives can now identify cost-saving opportunities and make standardization recommendations like contract purchases and purchases of Allegiance's own line of "Best Value" products. In the long-term, Allegiance anticipates achieving continued profitability through improved customer relationships made possible by ASPIRE.
Allegiance set out to make ASPIRE an extremely easy-to-use tool, one that could react quickly to business change. Crucial to achieving this purpose is the BusinessObjects reporting tool.
A sales representative simply points and clicks at a list of potential reports. ASPIRE then searches a list of BusinessObjects templates to find the appropriate report. BusinessObjects retrieves the information from the data warehouse, exports the information to Excel, and the sales representative receives the information in the form of a spreadsheet. If sales representatives have to be alerted about a corporate issue, such as the need to improve cash flow targets, a BusinessObjects query can be written, and then quickly distributed to the sales force through ASPIRE for immediate action.
Win/Win Benefits for Customers and Sales
Both Allegiance management and the sales force consider ASPIRE to be a success. By having access to product ordering information, sales representatives can help customers look for ways to consolidate orders and identify such cost-savings opportunities as moving off-contract product purchases to group contracts.
By providing its sales force with business intelligence and the ability to query the data warehouse using the built-in Business Objects reporting tool, ASPIRE extends the benefit of information access to an organization's supply chain to both sales representatives and customers alike.
