People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste
- by Michael Snow
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Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry.
Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes.
Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal
Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner
Customer Overview
Omnitracs,
Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to
companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include
basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such
as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and
weighting distribution, and many others.
Customer Business Needs
Already
the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose
to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch
customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to
manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several
self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer
satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very
intuitive and easy to use.
The
systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional
installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation.
Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available
for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details.
Omnitracs
wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer
experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well
as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an
architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals.
Omnitracs’ stated goal was
to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their
customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large
company customer base.
Solution
Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support
needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a
cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self
service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also
allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and
external) customers.
This solution
was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large
and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on
applications for the devices (much like
the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other
companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service
agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts.
This is a
conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components
that make up the solution.
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The portal
application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’
business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its
customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the
downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a
decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of
the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the
solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge
whether eBS is running or not.
Here are two sample screenshots of the portal
application built in Oracle ADF.
Customer
Benefits
The Customer Portal not only provided the
scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with
other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are:
Improved Customer Experience: With a modern
look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the
customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all
of the pages.
Enabled new product launches: After
successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a
scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a
huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers
have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now
takes minutes
Seamless Integrations Improves Customer
Support:
ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into
one integrated solution. This
provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing
focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales
Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through
the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations
included:
Unity Core
Salesforce.com
Merchant e-Solution for credit card
Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and
AUTO
Security utilizing OID and OVD
Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard)
and iQ Database
Business Impact
Significant business impacts were
realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business
to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to
spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and
identifying the market for new products.
Some of the Immediate Benefits are
The entire onboarding process is now completely
automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85%
productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160
times faster!
With the success of this self-service
solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the
next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base
and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services.
90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and
management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM
solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality
Unified login for all Customers, Partners and
Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all
other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience
Significantly improved customer experience
with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal
screens.
Helped sales of the new product by having an
easy way of ordering and activating the product.
Data Guard helped increase availability of the
Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave
customers the feel of high availability of the portal application.
Some of
the anticipated longer term Benefits are:
Platform that can be leveraged to launch
any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new
customers and new markets
Easy integration with content management
to allow business owners more control of the product catalog
Overall reduced TCO with standardization
of the Oracle platform
Managed IT support cost savings through
optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution
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