Datacard distributed pricing for its secure identification and card issuance products to approximately 250 partners quarterly by e-mailing them a price book made up of multiple spreadsheets. To create this price book, people in marketing and sales had to spend many hours inputting data manually and the Datacard partners that received the price books had to manually type their data into their own systems and check their accuracy, a process requiring as much as two days. Changing a price was very time-consuming, complex, and people-dependent, preventing Datacard’s marketing and sales staff from performing more valuable work.
After eight months of intense collaboration and process review, Datacard’s information systems team created a custom solution to automate the pricing process using Oracle
E-Business Suite. The team created a single version of the price book, with each Datacard customer receiving a price book tailored to its specific needs that can automatically update its corporate systems. Redesigning this process dramatically decreased the amount of time required for price updates each quarter, saving 6,000 hours of work annually, and twice that amount at partners’ sites.
Diagram Datacard Group’s old and redesigned business process for pricing using a swimlane flowchart.