When Business Communication is Critical
Companies spend millions of dollars developing business content and making it available via communication vehicles such as Web-based portals. But many of them cannot guarantee that the information is delivered to users when they need it, in a form that users can readily comprehend and use. The problem is exacerbated for mobile workers and “disconnected” users such as executives, sales personnel, partners, and distributors. These highly mobile, critical portal users are typically responsible for generating revenue; unfortunately, they have the most difficulty obtaining the information they need.
The Problem with Portals
According to a recent study by Tech-Republic and its parent the Gartner Group, roughly 40% of all IT projects fail to meet business requirements and the average IT organization annually ties up 10% of its IT staff on work that contributes no value to the business. In many cases, the problem stems from the way online information is managed and exchanged. Most corporate communication systems are built around Enterprise Information Portals that are ideal for aggregating information and managing content, but they don’t guarantee usage or ensure that important information gets to the people who need it. This is because portals–and many other information systems, for that matter–are designed for people who are connected to the network, not for those critical users who must access information while away from the office. A portal’s business value is therefore diminished when its critical users aren’t accessing and using it.
To solve this problem, IT leaders should consider offline access at the inception of every project. This not only improves the business value of the system, but makes it more visible to the key stakeholders who provide support and funding.
Guidant Corporation faced this problem head on. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Guidant is a $3 billion medical technology company that develops and manufactures products to treat cardiovascular disease. In an industry where lives depend on thorough understanding of product information, Guidant needs to make sure that its national network of 1,300 medical device sales representatives can rapidly assimilate information about new products.
“It’s an ongoing challenge: How do we get marketing and training material in the hands of our reps in a timely manner so they are equipped to meet with customers?” says William McConnell, vice president and chief information officer at Guidant. “We are a high-tech business, and 65% of our revenue comes from products that are less than 12 months old.”
Since 2000, Guidant has been developing a multi-phased strategy for sales force automation that includes reporting, medical device tracking, and online delivery of sales and training information. At the heart of this initiative is an offline portal called “Pipeline” that delivers important information directly to the reps’ laptops whenever they connect to the network.
According to John Peasley, lead manager for sales force automation at Guidant, corporate sale reps are continually on the road, so Guidant needed a bulletproof remote-access strategy that could address the issues of a sales force dependent on dial-up Internet connections. “In the past, all of our communication processes were voicemail or paper oriented,” he recalls. “The sales reps lived on faxes and voicemail. Since our focus is on making the representatives productive, we were particularly interested in improving the delivery of training, marketing, and sales information—offline as well as online.”
Delivering Rich Content
Peasley knew that being able to deliver computer-based training modules directly to laptop computers would be an incredible advantage for these mobile sales professionals. “We are strong believers in multimedia training and sales information such as color slides and video presentations,” he says. “The best computer-based training modules incorporate rich video and interactive animation to make the learning experience more appealing to users.”
To realize the vision, Peasley and his team used BackWeb® ProactivePortal™ technologies to develop the Pipeline infrastructure. Now, whenever a Guidant sales rep connects to the network, Pipeline automatically identifies pertinent content for download. BackWeb delivers alerts and digital packages of any size or format, including audio, video, graphics and HTML content. If Guidant needs to deliver an urgent or time-sensitive message, such as an announcement about FDA approval or a bulletin about a product issue, an alert will flash as well.
“We monitor the frequency with which sales reps log on and interact with their sales reports so we can determine if we are delivering useful reports and how we can improve their offline access to critical portal content,” says Peasley. “We have two administrators managing the system on an ongoing basis. The offline portal solution was developed in about four months.”
Getting the Message
BackWeb includes capabilities to allow critical information to be delivered to the appropriate user in the appropriate way. Users subscribe to content they want to receive and specify which content will be delivered offline. Once downloaded to their laptops reps can review the material at their leisure. They can establish preferences for how information is prioritized, request notification of delivery to a mobile device when they are offline, and even request that the content be made available for offline usage. Information Technology (IT) managers can generate reports to discover how often users interact with the content, when they last received content, and which content they interact with most frequently.
“We can monitor content-usage in a closed-loop fashion to ensure that each rep is equipped for the job,” says McConnell. “Generally, we send out content with a ‘normal’ priority. But BackWeb lets us flag users by identifying a critical piece of content.” To preserve network resources, BackWeb’s Polite® technology allows Guidant to send information only when adequate bandwidth is available. Byte-level file transfer enables the content to be sent in increments whenever the rep connects to the network. Users can receive content in the background without creating performance interruptions to other network applications such as email and browsing.
Measuring Results
McConnell says delivering information through the offline portal gives Guidant a huge competitive advantage. Guidant sales reps are constantly in hospitals or moving between hospitals. Now, he is confident that they will always have the right material to present to physicians. “Our remote access technology is very robust and stable,” he says. “BackWeb overcomes the constraints of dial-in technology, allowing us to communicate with the field organization at an optimal level.”
Peasley estimates that using Pipeline instead of a courier service such as FedEx saves about two thousand dollars per mailing. Other hard savings stem from reduced on-site training efforts: sending multimedia training materials through Pipeline means face-to-face training can be cut down or eliminated—at a cost of about two hundred dollars per rep, per day. Sales ramp-up is shortened by several months because field reps now receive top-quality training videos delivered directly to their computers. And with the BackWeb closed-loop reporting and Rapid Survey features, the field reps are tested for comprehension and certified on new products within a few days, as opposed to a few months.
“Reps who have come from competing companies tell us that our training and information delivery infrastructure is a cut above other companies like ours in the industry,” says Peasley. “They are ecstatic when they see our sophisticated tools and the volume of excellent marketing sales and training information we can deliver through Pipeline. We now have the ability to send all kinds of content and monitor its receipt. BackWeb has become an essential part of our sales force automation strategy.” The Benefits of Offline Access
As Guidant has demonstrated, a complete information delivery strategy should assess what information is truly important to an organization’s success and then ensure that it reaches the right people’s attention—even when they are offline or working remotely. Our research reveals that 50% of portal ROI is based on disconnected users. In other words, the people who drive revenue are typically the ones who spend the most time out of the office. Executives, field sales personnel, partners, distributors—these are the customer-facing people, and also the ones who are often on the road. You can’t expect them to come into the office to gather information, yet that’s where the information typically resides.
Guidant’s example also emphasizes that in order for an IT project to deliver lasting business value, it must take into account the needs of the disconnected user from the very beginning.
“We have overwhelming support for the value that this technology is providing,” McConnell concludes. “Ninety percent of the reps are using it, and they are getting the information they need. In our case, the ROI is more anecdotal than measurable, but the feedback we’re getting is that the technology is improving productivity and helping the reps do their jobs.”
BackWeb helps companies maximize heir content investments by prioritizing, delivering and promoting the usage of critical information to customers, suppliers, partners and employees across the enterprise.
BackWeb ProactivePortal technologies allow companies to ensure that the right people have the right information at the right time. Many Fortune 500 companies rely on BackWeb to manage critical communications across the enterprise, maximize their portal investments, and streamline their e-businesses.