Work Flow Systems and Process Improvement Driving Improved Sales Efficiency
The Client
Since 1973, TEXAS MONTHLY has chronicled life in contemporary Texas, reporting on vital issues such as politics, the environment, industry and education. As a leisure guide, TEXAS MONTHLY continues to be the indispensable authority on the Texas scene, covering music, the arts, travel, restaurants, museums and cultural events with its insightful recommendations. Above all, TEXAS MONTHLY provides its readers with a magazine of the highest editorial quality, a standard that has earned TEXAS MONTHLY 8 National Magazine Awards and 36 nominations.
The Challenge
TEXAS MONTHLY’s advertising sales team is spread out nationwide, and they sought ways to reduce time spent processing paperwork and doing office chores that took away time they could be spending with customers. Meanwhile, the company e-mail system could be used only for internal communications, not outside the office. Major remote offices include Dallas, Houston and New York, data sharing was inefficient and problematic. The aging server was out of date and unable to support growing communications and business needs.
The Approach
TEXAS MONTHLY engaged zCore Business Solutions (zCore) to optimize the network, install a more robust infrastructure, and support high-performance workflow for field-based salespeople and headquarter people alike. In zCore, TEXAS MONTHLY found a Lotus Premium Partner with depth of experience in designing solutions and a strong local practice prepared to provide rapid on-site support and responsiveness.
The zCore team first clarified project requirements. It was quickly evident that TEXAS MONTHLY needed an extensible system, enabling features to be added or enabled as the group grows. An existing sales system, OverQuota, needed to be supported on the new platform.
The Solution
The zCore project team specified, configured and installed a server hearty enough to support information sharing within the Austin office, between Austin and its field sales force, and between TEXAS MONTHLY and its parent company. In tandem with the server specification, the project team defined a Domino-based solution. Working closely with TEXAS MONTHLY's in-house technical staff, zCore deployed Domino so that TEXAS MONTHLY would have secure Internet access for e-mail, OverQuota documents, and so forth.
The Results
TEXAS MONTHLY’s Vice President, Texas Advertising Director, April Hinkle hoped for better efficiency and results from her team with the new system. Her expectations have been met. “Our salespeople are much more efficient now,” she notes. “We have sped up our internal communications processes, and that means that we can get faster, better answers for our customers as well. We’ve seen better contact sharing between the sales team and the publisher, and our salespeople are more efficient and mobile with the Web-based solution.”
Cindy Wesch, TEXAS MONTHLY Director of Technology, states, “We've seen a major increase in productivity with the Domino-based Notes system from zCore. Getting good sales data from the field back to the office used to take almost a month, and now we get the data in only a few hours. We also have much better data integrity with the built-in database replication whereas in our old system any application failure could cause huge data problems.”
As a key member of Cindy Wesch's team, Cynthia Dunham provides administration for the system. She is pleased with the system's ability to replicate data between remote sites, and she cites improved data transfer performance: instead of spending 1.5 hours to send relevant files between Dallas/Austin and Houston/Austin, the same information now zaps through in one minute.
As TEXAS MONTHLY continues to expand, the zCore solution will expand with them. Features that can be phased in include Web-based Domino applications for e-mail capability via a Web browser as well as customizations to Lotus' mail database design.
