Manufacturer of perfume, pharmaceutical bottles taps provider to improve response time to customer requests
Chicago and Toulouse, France — March 11, 2004 — Saint-Gobain Desjonquères, a company of the packaging division of the Saint-Gobain Group, has selected Cameleon Advanced Selling Solutions from ACCESS COMMERCE to streamline its quotation process and improve response time to each and every customer request.
Saint-Gobain Desjonquères manufactures perfume bottles with the most sophisticated shapes and color hues requested by designers, along with pharmaceutical and cosmetic bottles. Every year, more than 300 new bottle designs are introduced, which represent a significant number of quotes the company must manage. Parallel to new designs, Saint-Gobain Desjonqueres also has to respond to numerous recurrent quotation requests.
At first glance, a glass bottle can seem fairly basic, but Saint-Gobain Desjonquères said it is actually a complex product with numerous constraints and combinations of shapes, materials, colors, decorations and packaging. The quotation process can be time-consuming and error-prone with a high level of engineering involvement and significant back-and forth between sales and manufacturing.
Philippe Heroin, chief information officer of Saint-Gobain Desjonquères, said, "Our old in-house system had become impossible to maintain and was unable to handle customer requests and product evolution. Parallel to the renewal of our ERP system with SAP, we selected Cameleon for its ability to streamline a complex quotation process, its completeness — both as a sales and manufacturing configurator and because of its ease-of-use, requiring very little custom development."
Heroin said Cameleon Advanced Selling will streamline the company's quotation process and help manage product knowledge and know-how throughout the company. Saint-Gobain Desjonquères will also rely on Cameleon software to rapidly calculate the accurate cost of a fragrance bottle given all the design, manufacturing and packaging constraints.
"Reducing our time-to-quote has always been our priority as it translates directly into more quotations generated and higher sales win rates. To do so, we had to streamline our quote response activities by providing sales professionals with the appropriate selling software," said Heroin.
With the deployment of Cameleon, Saint-Gobain Desjonquères will digitize its key product knowledge, such as all the possible options of shapes, materials, colors, decoration and packaging together with the associated design and manufacturing rules and constraints. The resulting solution will make this knowledge available to all the people involved in the quotation process, making collaborative work much more effective. The Cameleon Advanced Selling Solutions will be integrated to SAP's ERP.
