PSS World Medical -- Detail Slide #2 Notes

Benefits of the BEA Platform:

• Fast time to market
  • Leading-edge personalization and portal features
  • Deployment (expected to take a year) accelerated by 4 months

   

• Robust platform
  • "Not only the safe choice, it's the best application server on the market."
  • "BEA provides us with unbeatable time-to-market, investment protection, personalization and scalability."

Results:

• PSS building stronger customer relationships
• Sales can focus on capital-equipment sales and relationship building

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PSS carries over 55,000 medical products from over 1,000 manufacturers, as well as a family of PSS-branded medical supplies. Customers can order all of these products from the portal, which includes a full-color catalog, a rewards program to encourage customer loyalty, an opt-in email service for marketing promotions, customer-specific pricing to reflect negotiated rates, and integration with an advertising server to deliver relevant product information to MyPSS users. In addition, the portal is fully integrated with the company's sales force automation (SFA) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to maximize operational efficiency. The BEA portal framework is 100-percent-pure Java, protecting the PSS investment against obsolescence, and enabling the rapid delivery of new features and functionality.

The massive MyPSS portal was developed and deployed in less than a year, and the PSS engineering team estimates that building the system in Java accelerated deployment by four months. PSS selected BEA after evaluating competing solutions, as well as outsourcing options. The company determined that none of the alternatives could offer the same scalability and mission-critical reliability as BEA without making great sacrifices in performance, flexibility, and standards compliance. "The BEA WebLogic environment is not only the safe choice, it's the best application server on the market. That made our final decision pretty easy," said David Ramsey, chief information officer at PSS.
The result of deploying such a robust portal is that PSS World Medical's customers now have greater control in the management of their inventories, more timely reporting to help them track usage patterns, and faster delivery of many expensive items that most customers would rather not stock.

For the 1,200-member PSS sales force, MyPSS means time. Sales people can actually service their clients rather than simply take orders. MyPSS offloads much of the work required to process low-margin, high-volume orders, allowing reps to focus on big-ticket capital equipment that typically has very long sales cycles and complicated approval channels. The time freed up by MyPSS also enables reps to make more sales calls and more customer visits to better understand the needs of their clientele. This increased interaction alone often leads to new sales opportunities as the reps discover customers' unmet equipment needs.

"MyPSS is helping us with two crucial needs that don't always co-exist easily in large sales operations," said David Ramsey, chief information officer at PSS. "MyPSS allows us to build much stronger relationships with each customer, while enabling our sales people to cover more territory and use their time more efficiently. In direct sales, what else really matters?"