CASE STUDY: Infor Streamlines Sharing Across Sales & Marketing Team With Web Portal

Alpharetta, GA-based Infor acquires and develops functionally rich software backed by thousands of domain experts and strives to enhance the software through continuous innovation, faster implementation options, global enablement and flexible buying options.

Sizing up Sharing Tools
With over 5,000 documents to be dispersed among its sales representatives, Infor needed a way to effectively distribute these informational tools. Due to the diverse customer base Infor serves, the documents needed to be organized and categorized accordingly, providing sales the opportunity to hone in on the information that is relevant to the leads each representative is pursuing.

The company also needed a way to keep the content fresh and relevant to specific interests of the diverse sales teams and channel partners, with a solution that could roll out quickly to reach thousands of staff and partners with targeted information. Infor hosts dozens of products across all major business application areas, including ERP, CRM, financial, HR and business intelligence. “We have a large number of sales teams that are responsible for certain product lines or certain industries, so we needed a way to effectively distribute information to this diverse group of sales reps and channel partners to help them sell, including the internal tools and customer facing materials they might use,” says Dave Alampi, VP, Global Marketing Strategy & Services, Infor.

The company chose iCentera’s Enterprise Edition full suite to manage its document sharing. “The nice thing about iCentera being on-demand is that they continually enhance the solution and we can take advantage of the features that make sense for us,” says Alampi. “We wanted a way to manage the creation and publishing of that information in a way that we could keep fresh,” he says of iCentera’s features.

Feature-Rich Solutions
From an end-user perspective, Alampi says, the solution has important features such as ratings and feedback capabilities, as well as tracking tools for number of downloads and other relevant metrics. The tools also allow the Infor team to send alerts to prospects informing them about newly available information and content relevant to their needs.

iCentera’s content indexing makes it easier for Infor to organize documents by product, solution and language. The search function provides a way to find documents without even knowing the category. iCentera’s services organization provided guidance and best practices for creating segment portals which serve as communities for the different product segments such as CRM and ERP.

Since Infor implemented iCentera’s solution, content is more easily located so sales reps can spend their valuable time focusing on understanding the customers’ problems and providing solutions through the sales cycle. This has enables publishers to roll out and announce fresh content quickly and to remove old content from all portals in minutes, which eliminates the circulation of out of date content. The iCentera solution was fully deployed in 90 days with 4,300 documents uploaded, organized and made available, according to Alampi.

Alampi said a company survey determined that over 99% of reps are using the sales portal. “The most important thing we can now do is get timely content out into the hands of the right people and do it quickly,” he says. “iCentera makes it possible for us to do that and we’re finding new ways to use the system to improve on that even more.”

In one of the signs that the improved flow of content is paying dividends, Infor’s Web traffic grew by 40% and is on track to replicate that growth in 2009.

“There’s no question that the value is being realized by the teams and we have been getting great feedback from the field,” Alampi said. “Sales reps are actually finding the content they need, and they aren’t wasting their time searching for tools and materials to support their sales efforts.”