Background

We are a $30M supplier of advanced RF and mixed-signal communications ICs for wireless infrastructure and mobile wireless, broadband communications, space, defense and avionics markets. We have a direct sales and marketing team of 15 people and sell through about 30 manufacturer’s representative companies and distributors.

Situation before NEHANET

We were at a $15M run-rate when we started using NEHANET. We were using gigantic excel spreadsheets to manage all the opportunity and forecasting information previously. The problem we had was in keeping it up to date and tying it up all together. For example, the opportunity was not tied to forecasts and we did not have an easy way to share information between sales, marketing reps and distributors. Every person kept an excel spreadsheet on their computer and we would all update our spreadsheets and send it to a central person for consolidation and cleanup. We, along with that central person, then had to figure out how to create reports off the consolidated spreadsheet.

The other challenge we faced was that people were tracking activities in their own ways and the work that was going on to move the opportunity to closure was not transparent to everyone. There was no easy way to convey activity information to the top management.

Benefits realized with NEHANET

We brought NEHANET in to address several issues:

• First, to have an opportunity tracking system that would allow us to drive and manage sales activity across customers and opportunities across reps, distributors and our sales and marketing people.
• Second, to make the sales activity visible to the rest of the management team.
• Third, to create a consolidated worldwide forecast that was based on actual opportunity information and done in a way that did not require excel geniuses to make it all work.
• Fourth, to keep track of key customer visits and actions items.

The whole company has switched over to managing the business in NEHANET. The business plan and the yearly plan are all driven from the data in the system. Now since the per-opportunity-per-customer data is completely transparent inside the company, any one can go in and see what activities are happening or what is the status of a customer that they are interested in. They can also see what the gap between the plan and the current numbers are for a given period.

One benefit is that management has become very active in going in to see the status of opportunities and one of the biggest users is our CEO. It is not that unusual to make an update to the system and get an email or a call from the CEO a few hours later asking for a clarification. NEHANET has also reduced our need to have to make presentations about what’s going on since people already know what’s going on through the system. Instead, there is more discussion about what’s needed to succeed. You can start to be more action-oriented instead of update-oriented when talking to management.

Finally, you can drive manufacturing plans by product, by package type plan etc directly out of NEHANET. We maintain 2 types of forecasts, the revenue plan and the manufacturing plan and NEHANET allows us to do both from a single system

Quote

“We wanted a system which did not depend on excel geniuses to keep it all cobbled together.”

Regional Sales Director

Products Used and Specific Benefits