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TULSA DENTAL IS A MAJOR SUPPLIER OF EQUIPMENT USED IN ENDODONTICS, OR ROOT CANAL WORK. TO PROVIDE ITS FIELD SALES FORCE WITH A MORE EFFICIENT MEANS OF PROVIDING INFORMATION AND TAKING ORDERS, TULSA DENTAL DEPLOYED A SOLUTION THAT USES DELL AXIM POCKET PCS RUNNING A SALES FORCE APPLICATION FROM SYNCFIELD AND SYNCHRONIZATION SOFTWARE FROM MICROSOFT PARTNER SYNCHROLOGIC.
Overview
Tulsa Dental is a major business unit of DENTSPLY International, a leading supplier of dental and oral surgery products, and specializes in providing equipment for endodontics, or root canal work. To sell its products to general practitioners and endodontics specialists, Tulsa Dental relies on a direct sales force of about 100 representatives who provide customers through the United States and Canada with product literature, "continuing education" courses in endodontics, and the ability to order products directly from clinics.
Situation
For years, Tulsa Dental's sales force relied on a combination of paper forms, fax machines, and a phone-based approach for relaying sales orders from the field to employees at the parent company's headquarters in York, Pennsylvania. The workflow process was slow and cumbersome at best and sometimes error-prone because of the chance that faxed or verbal orders could be misread or misinterpreted. The company wanted a more efficient automated solution that could reduce time and errors while freeing up sales representatives to spend more time selling the company's products. A key challenge was providing the sales force with ample data about the company's products as well as a streamlined way of entering orders from customer sites or the sales rep's office at the end of the day. Tulsa Dental and its parent company also wanted to make use of existing IT investments, including a Web site and substantial back-end database that contain data about the company and its sales, its products, and its customers.
Solution
Tulsa Dental worked with SyncField, a provider of custom field service automation solutions, to deploy a solution using a large SyncField application running on Microsoft® Windows® Powered Pocket PCs. To ensure smooth synchronization with a back-end Microsoft SQL Server™ database, SyncField used SQL Server 2000 Windows CE Edition to manage the Tulsa Dental literature and customer database information on the Pocket PC devices, while relying on the Mobile Suite from Synchrologic--a Microsoft Mobility Partner Advisory Council member--for synchronizing orders and other information between the field representatives and headquarters.
Pocket PCs and SQL Server CE Support Large Databases
Chris Ossenbeck, IT Manager for Tulsa Dental, says implementation of the company Web site was the first step in providing its 100+ field representatives with easier access to information. But it was still difficult for them to access information when they were not sitting near a PC.
"We needed something that could give our reps offline access to most of the information that we provided on the Web, such as product literature, a customer's sales history, a continuing education course, or the ability to place an order for a customer," Ossenbeck says. "We chose SyncField because they offered the best solution for leveraging the information on our SQL Server 2000 sales reporting database--using SQL Server CE on Pocket PCs."
Peter Wilson, President and Chief Executive Officer of SyncField, says the power of SQL Server CE enables a solution that stores about 40,000 records on each handheld device. The solution runs on Dell Axim X5 Pocket PCs and gives Tulsa Dental's mobile representatives quick access to a vast array of information. For example, they can easily check on a dentist's order history just before walking into his office in order to fine-tune product recommendations, suggest continuing education courses, or enter orders on the spot.
Rapid Synchronization of Data
At the end of each day, the Pocket PCs are synchronized through the use of cradles. Information is sent over a dial-up connection to Tulsa Dental, where it is synchronized using Synchrologic Data Sync, a component of Mobile Suite. Synchrologic Mobile Suite includes a series of modules that provide different functionality, including data and file synchronization as well as system management.
"The combination of Synchrologic Data Sync and SQL CE is a powerful incentive for companies such as Tulsa Dental to use the Pocket PC platform," says John Dancu, President and Chief Operating Officer of Synchrologic. "This kind of enterprise-scale solution--which is quickly deployed and provides mission-critical information to a dispersed sales force--is enabling companies like Tulsa Dental to increase their competitive edge."
Ossenbeck adds that he was "very uncomfortable with the idea of creating a custom synchronization solution--that's why we liked SyncField's recommendation that we use Synchrologic. It is working very well. We generate hundreds of invoices a day. Synchrologic Mobile Suite helps synchronize that information and then send down the invoices to the representatives whose territory generated the invoices."
Wilson says that, despite the size of the database on the Pocket PCs, the Synchrologic software is able to synchronize data in about two minutes. "Synchrologic has a unique architecture that lends itself to synchronizing extremely large amounts of data to many users very quickly," he says. "This means that Tulsa Dental's representatives can do in 10 minutes what used to take up to 45 minutes--so they can spend more time on building business."
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