Going up: Elevator maker credits e-commerce platform for online sales boost
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/28/2007 8:52:00 PM
ThyssenKrupp Elevator Manufacturing France (TEF), one of the world’s leading elevator companies, has significantly boosted its online sales and overall revenues after adopting a new e-commerce software suite.
The Cameleon Commerce Suite from Access Commerce contains a robust product configurator, which is extremely important for a company selling complex products like elevators. TEF, a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp AG, operates in 45 countries and manufactures more than 3,900 elevators annually for sale worldwide.
TEF executives say the Access Commerce platform works so well that the company now takes more than 60 percent of its orders online.
“Since we started using the Cameleon Commerce Suite we have improved our responsiveness, increasing customer satisfaction,” explains Jérôme Morille, head of industrial systems and sales support at TE.F “The Cameleon product configurator allows us to increase productivity when preparing estimates and installation plans for elevators. We have seen our revenue increase largely due to the automation of our sales process and in particular the successful launch of our online channel.”
By capturing detailed product information, pricing, and rules from engineering and marketing, Cameleon enables TEF sales teams to generate reliable pricing and accurate installation plans for their customers in real time, using 3D visualization to check that the configuration meets the customer’s requirements, Morille says. TEF distributors, sales agents, and customers can go to a Web site to get prices for specific configurations of elevators and immediately place orders.
In addition to boosting revenue, Morille says, the implementation of Cameleon at TEF has driven performance in other areas including:
• A 25-percent reduction in order-to-delivery cycle times;
• Improved customer satisfaction through self-service, 3D visualization, and shorter lead times;
• Time required to analyze elevator requirements cut by a factor of three; and
• Consistency across every sales channel.
