Web-Based Sales Force Automation

The Requirements

The sales force at a major manufacturer of commercial roofing materials were using an antiquated and inflexible system for generating standard specification documents for their customers and prospects.  With the content of the specifications needing to change frequently, our customer needed a system with the following features:

• The system had to be extremely easy to use, minimizing the training of the nationwide sales force.

• Headquarters staff needed to easily customize boiler plate text at headquarters and have the changes immediately applied in the field.

• The system needed to generates specifications documents in either WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.

The Solution

We designed an easy to use application that implemented a "decision tree." The application walked the user through a series of questions and built up the information needed to generate the quote document.

After the user had completed the form, the application automatically uploaded the answers to headquarters. On the headquarters server we used our own program to generate and save a WordPerfect or Microsoft Word document on the headquarters server. Then, the application retrieved the completed document from the server and stored it on the user's machine.  All of this took just a few short minutes and the system kept the user informed of its progress. 

Technology, Tools and Innovations

We used VB to develop the client program that walked the user through the data collection form. The VB program then used FTP to load the answers to the headquarters server. Once the upload was complete, the VB program started an Active Server Pages script on the server that drove the VB program that generated the WordPerfect or Microsoft Word document, depending on the user's preference. We then used FTP to download the completed document to the user's computer.

A database, NOT in the code, contained all the questions, choices, and dependencies of the questions in the decision tree implemented in the sales force's data collection input screen. This allowed the entire decision tree to be easily modified via an Access application we wrote specifically for this purpose. Our client could now modify the system themselves and then download changes to all of the users without any changes to the program. 

We used Microsoft Access for the decision tree database and the application used at headquarters to customize it. We used our own proprietary code generator to generate the code for the objects we used in Visual Basic and Access.