COSCO “opens eyes,” goes FrontRange

International shipping giant COSCO Container Lines Americas figures produced some good news for FrontRange Solutions partner First Direct Corporation this week regarding that company’s CRM solution implementation, and First Direct representatives were all too pleased to show how COSCO “faced a dilemma that most companies without a unified CRM system encounter.” To address this issue, CCLA chose First Direct Corp. to implement their FrontRange GoldMine and iGoldMine solutions for the entire North American COSCO sales team.

In choosing GoldMine, CCLA North America sales assistant vice president Tim Marsh knows of what he speaks when discussing CRM solutions and the selection of First Direct products: “I’ve used them all," Marsh said. One of CCLA’s biggest challenges in this initiative was keeping up with customer records and correspondence. Without CRM practices in place, insufficient and disorganized information was rife. The lack of a centralized system meant that regional managers were unable to access comprehensive sales information, and salespeople struggled to piece together required weekly sales reports. District and regional managers had no way to analyze weekly sales reports quickly or readily share them with CCLA executives around the world. The GoldMine product seeks to streamline these processes, collecting data through a series of questions ensuring the sales force keeps comprehensive and standardized customer records for data such as call types, import/export, and type of cargo.

An automated GoldMine process generates team-wide sales reports showing a summarized breakdown of activities, time spent and results by individual, district, region and nation. CCLA reports “outstanding” results thus far. Salespeople have reportedly saved at least two hours per week in compiling reports, and managers now save a whopping ten hours a week in report reviewing. New employee training has been reduced by some ninety percent, and chances of losing information with a sales rep’s departure from the company has “greatly decreased.” A future project will feature CCLA and First Direct Corp.’s configuring of GoldMine to track cargo within COSCO’s fleet of ships throughout the world. Additionally, CCLA will soon pull U.S. Customs information into the GoldMine system in order to “better understand the competition” (read: get a serious edge on the competition).

Marsh said CCLA will eventually use GoldMine to forecast shipments, and launch e-mail and other marketing campaigns. According to Marsh, the company’s ultimate plan is to expand GoldMine worldwide and refine its global processes further with help from 1stdirect.com. "First Direct opens our eyes to what we are doing, and shows us how we can apply practical business models to our processes," Marsh said. COSCO Container Lines Americas, a division of CCLA Group Worldwide, currently boasts coverage of 160 countries and regions with 600 shipping vessels in over 100 ports with more than 90,000 employees in all facets of the shipping industry.

First Direct Corp. has been a FrontRange Solutions partner supporting all FrontRange/GoldMine products since 1992. Services handled by the firm include analysis/process design, installation and configuration, customization, training, automated processes, data conversion, reporting, on-site support and help desk support. FrontRange Solutions software and solutions are used by over 130,000 companies and 1.2 million clients. FrontRange product specializes in small- to medium-enterprise and distributed enterprise organizations.

GoldMine is for business relationship management, team-based contact management and sales forces automation solutions; IT service management has HEAT and ITIL standards-based modules for complete service management; communication management including IP Contact Center promises reduced telephony costs, increased agent productivity, streamlined customer service and communications; and their infrastructure management, promises to optimize the full lifecycle of a company’s assets. FrontRange clients include Coca-Cola, Shell Oil, Prudential Securities, Electricite de France, Mack Trucks, Campbell Soup, Avaya, Bechtel Corp, Bank of America, and the Turner News Network.