Surprising though it may seem, it took until just last month for one of the world’s leading technology companies to jump on the electronic ordering and purchasing bandwagon.
National Semiconductor, a $2.5 billion firm that sells silicon-based products, has started three extranet services in the hopes of adding greater efficiency to its marketing process and saving itself and its customers $100 million in procurement costs.
What’s more, the company is looking for sizable sales increases from the easier processes. Interactive marketing manager Phil Gibson notes that National sees “a $1 billion forecasted opportunity.”
The first new service provides customers’ buyers and purchasing managers with pricing, product availability and packaging information 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This potentially enables the firm to reach 20 times the number of purchasers it could contact through a telemarketing call center.
With National’s current system, purchasing agents and design engineers, for example, “can spend five to six hours a day on the phone looking for that one part,” notes Gibson. (National’s customers include original equipment manufacturers and other large corporations.)
The second of these new systems lets the company’s 400-plus salespeople design targeted Web sites for customers in about half an hour, assuming they meet certain criteria. These pages allow the customers’ customers to get hold of both public and private communications like purchasing contracts, prices and lead times, as well as new product specifications. National hopes to have about 200 of these sites up and running this summer.
These Web sites are being set up to take payments through credit cards. Gibson says concerns about transaction security aren’t much of a problem when dealing with corporate transactions, even when the prices and number of goods to be purchased are high.
The third new extranet system enables National’s salespeople and distributors to access the company’s mainframe ordering system to get up-to-the-minute prices, lead-time quotes and other information to automate the sales process.
Gibson adds that a number of customers in the San Francisco Bay area have already signed on to conduct business using this method.
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