Background
Schenker of Canada is one of the largest transportation solution companies in Canada with 16 branches and over 700 employees. Our aim is to turn our customers' supply chain into a competitive advantage. Our challenge, as an integrated logistics company, was to make our corporate communications and sales information flow to our over 50 field sales reps as smoothly as our shipments flow for our customers. The problem was that we had no efficient way to disseminate our real-time information to the field. This meant that we had delays and inefficiencies in a number of areas, including: getting accurate freight price quotes back to our clients; getting new leads to the appropriate rep. in the field; and recording and responding to client support issues.

Salesplace not only solved our problems, but also allowed us to extend and leverage our current investment in the IBM Lotus Domino environment. When I was tasked with the job of finding a CRM product that would meet our needs, I certainly hoped that we'd find something within the Notes world, but my number one job was to solve our problems. We took a close look at a number of products, including Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM but we were pleased to find a Notes-based solution in Salesplace that could automate our sales and service processes, improve the visibility of our customer information and address our mobility requirements. Best of all, fully integrates with our corporate Notes mail and calendar.

Salespace Value
We went live with Salesplace in July of 2005 and the impact within our organization has been tremendous. In the past our people were frequently tripping over each other. We had sales reps making multiple calls to the same prospect, sales reps visiting an account unaware of outstanding service issues, sales reps missing out on deals because of our inefficiencies with respect to submitting freight quote requests and quickly responding to reps with pricing. Since the deployment of Salesplace and their BlackBerry Mobile Edition, we have made significant progress on all fronts. In a nutshell, we now have customer visibility across our entire organization.

I believe that a major part of the success we've achieved is due to the Salesplace BlackBerry component. It is as if our field reps now carry the office in their back pocket. They are never out of touch with our corporate Salesplace server. Even if they are out-of-coverage, they can continue to up-date their records and the next time they are in coverage their data is automatically synchronized with the Salesplace server. We have been able to increase the speed of generating freight quotes by over 20%. Distributing leads to the appropriate field rep used to take several days - now it takes several minutes. And now, if there is an active customer service issue, the sales reps are immediately aware and don't find themselves walking into a customer site only to get blind-sided by outstanding problems.

Salesplace Team
Salesplace has truly demonstrated that they are not just a software company. They took the time to understand our business and tailor their solution to best meet our needs. We consider them as a true business partner.