With over 75,000 customers worldwide in various types of businesses and industries, SalesManager Software (www.salesmanager.com) announced it has developed SalesManager for Transport, a customized customer relationship management (CRM) solution for the transportation industry. The solution was developed in close cooperation with Bas HQ, a leading logistic service provider in the Netherlands and is now available in the United States through the company’s new office in Fort Worth, Texas.
One of the most labor intensive activities at Bas HQ has always been generating quotations for their customers, says Jan de Ruiter, IT manager for Bas HQ.
“Like all transport companies, we are continually being approached for quotes for different loads to a vast series of locations. We traditionally accomplished this using an array of spreadsheets with destination and distance tables, combined with the various load factors to arrive at the right price.”
Compiling a quote for 20 destinations in Southern Europe for various ranges of weights or volumes could take anything up to 2 days, Ruiter says. “Of course, the customer always found it too expensive, so you had to do it 2-3 times before you finally got the deal.”
SalesManager for Transport enables integration of all the relevant transport information into one CRM solution, the company says. The solution addresses many transportation processes in one application, including quotations, orders, contract management, complaints handling, activities, central calendar and document management.
SalesManager for Transport’s Quotation / Proposal module includes:
· Single pick-up and delivery quotes
· Quotes with pricing agreement for multiple destinations
· Display pricing agreements with min/max prices
· Indexing of current pricing agreements
· Recalculation of discreet parts of a pricing agreements while locking the rest to
prevent unwanted and undesirable changes
· Mail merge quotes to Word
· Export pricing agreements to Excel
SalesManager for Transport allows personnel to easily calculate prices and send them directly to customers, either by mail, fax or letter. The quotes are saved automatically and enable an organization to have a clear and permanent overview of all of their clients’ quotes, the company says.
The application enables multiple routing agreements based on volume and distance in a single quote and easy manipulation using an Excel-like grid control. Data can be inserted in the detail screen for type of commodity, kind of transport (import / export), area distribution, units, or minimum prices, etc.
When pricing agreements become contracts, they are automatically saved in the contract management module. The contract module then manages all of the businesses activities concerning that unique customer. In addition to service level agreements, this module provides the organization with the ability to index current contracts on a yearly basis, compare the exact volumes shipped against the projected volumes agreed to in the contract, and provide account managers with the actual up-to-date status of all contracts for each of their customers.
SalesManager for Transport also allows contracts to be exported to back-office Transport Management Systems (TMS). In addition the application has tools to import data from external (TMS) systems.
Since going live with the system, Bas HQ has reduced the lead time for building a pricing agreement for multiple locations from 2 days to 2 hours, and the prices and the margin are right every time, Ruiter says.
