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Tallgrass Technologies, an Information Technology Management company in Kansas City, Kansas, needed to extend its customer services in order to compete in the value added reseller market. Their existing and new business was being threatened by the direct model offered by Dell, Compaq and CDW. The competition introduced by the direct model was causing the company to either compete based on price or customer relationships. In order to compete effectively in the market and grow existing and new customer business, Tallgrass realized that they needed to acquire a supplier solution that offered online ordering capabilities to their customers. In addition, the online ordering tool needed to have direct access to their distributors to facilitate the speed and cost for sourcing with their vendors.
After researching several web-enabled solutions, Tallgrass chose the CyBiz supplier enablement solution because it offered a flexible procurement solution for their customers while giving them direct access to the catalog content and sourcing capabilities from their two major distributors, Ingram and Tech Data. A key criterion in the decision was the ability for the CyBiz solution to offer administrative rights to the end-customer. The CyBiz solution offers a hierarchical permission based system allowing end-users access to certain content and functions on the system. This is very important to many of Tallgrass' customers who requested a higher level of involvement in managing the procurement site for their employees.
The CyBiz Trans-Enterprise Workflow was also an important feature for Tallgrass and their customers. Out-of-the-box, Tallgrass is able to set up branded procurement sites for each customer with either a direct purchasing workflow or a one-step approval workflow. In addition, Tallgrass can offer more complex workflows for customers who require multi-step approval processes. The flexibility of offering different levels of workflows allows Tallgrass to serve the diverse procurement needs of their customers.
By implementing the solution, Tallgrass offers its customers an easy way to search and place online orders for IT products through its global IT catalog or directly from the distributors' catalogs. To the customers, the distributors are mostly transparent and offer all the products the customers require for their businesses. Tallgrass is also utilizing the CyBiz fulfillment module to source directly from Ingram and Tech Data. This allows Tallgrass to check real-time availability and price from their distributors and source accordingly to meet the customers' timeframes.
The solution is deployed on the Microsoft .NET infrastructure including Windows 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000. "We are very happy with the technology solution being built on top of the Microsoft .NET infrastructure, stated Steve Downing, Director Professional Serivces, Tallgrass. It is a sound technology with excellent performance and allows us to scale our business incrementally and cost effectively. Once we upgrade our accounting system, we plan to integrate the CyBiz solution with our internal systems to further take advantage of CyBiz capabilities to automate our back-office processes."
Tallgrass has more than thirty of their largest customers using the online ordering and procurement solution. Customers include Garmin International (GPS), US Central Credit Union, Time Warner Cable, Kaufmann Foundation, Grinnell Mutual Group and Reece Nichols. By implementing the CyBiz solution, Tallgrass was able to convert 100 percent of the CDW business for US Central Credit Union to Tallgrass. For all the customers now using the Tallgrass online ordering solution, Tallgrass is receiving a larger portion of each customer's business. On average, the volume per key customers has increased by 50 to 70 percent. Business for customers that periodically buy from Tallgrass has increased by 20 to 30 percent on average.
"The CyBiz supplier enablement solution has allowed our company to become more competitive and to offer the value added service our customers require - a convenient online ordering system," stated Bruce Enright, CEO Tallgrass. In addition, our sales organization can spend more time servicing the customer and finding new business. We've seen our revenue expand significantly with our existing client accounts and we now have an opportunity to develop new business outside our geographic area."
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