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How
It Works
In
the (wholesale beauty supplies, pet food supply, pharmaceutical etc.)
marketplace, Order-Stream™ software and Palm hand held computing
provide a powerful combination that will totally automate the complete
order taking process. Here
is how it works:
The
complete customer data base and product master for each sales
territory is downloaded to the Palm PDA.
As the sales rep calls on customers, he/she can call up each
customer's demographic information on the Palm.
Customer name, address, phone number, ship-to's etc. come up on
the first screen.
The
rep also has access to past buying history, credit status of account
and any other relevant information, such as any open orders for that
particular customer and any notes that the rep may have taken
previously. The big
advantage here is that all this information is current up to the sales
rep's last upload to head office, which in most cases would be the
previous day.
This
is also true for pricing or any other information that a manager may
want to communicate to the field.
If head office has price changes or perhaps wants to put
special pricing or discounts to the field, this information can be
communicated to each rep by simply downloading the information to each
rep's file.
Orders
are built electronically as the sales rep and the customer go through
the catalogue or walk around the store. Items can be added to the
order by a simple search/scroll through the item master in the Palm
database. Quantities,
discounts, special pricing etc. can all be added to the order.
Order-Stream™
features such as item lookup, running total, order edit and product
availability would all be available at this stage.
Upon
completion of the order, the sales rep has access to Order-Stream™
features such as payment code (check, Visa etc), ship via and
discounting (line item
discount, price override on or off, line item %, whole order % and
customized pricing).
The
sales rep can now print a copy of the order for the customer using the
Palm's infrared feature. The
rep points to the infrared port on the portable printer (several
models are available including HP and Canon) and touches the print
icon.
At
the end of the order taking session, or perhaps at the end of the day,
the sales rep would upload all orders from the Palm to head office by
simply placing the Palm in the cradle and depressing the "hot
synch" key. Orders
are sent to the company accounting software via interface software so
manual keyboarding is totally eliminated.
An administrator would release all orders for existing
customers to the warehouse. Orders
for new customers would be collected in a separate file so the
administrator could set up the demographic information and do credit
check. The system would
then assign a customer number and the order would be released to the
system.
A
big advantage to Order-Stream™ here is that an unlimited number of
sales reps can upload orders into the head office system
simultaneously without crashes. Also,
as the order is being uploaded, any new information for the sales rep
is downloaded to his/her Palm.
This
same system can be used at trade shows utilizing Symbol bar code
scanning technology. Instead
of using the search/scroll feature on the Palm to add items to an
order, you may choose to bar code the display products in your show
booth and select them by scanning.
All the features in the above description are available here as
well.
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