Gilat
Gilat sells, develops and markets Satellite communication solutions that are used by service providers world wide. Selling these solutions require a lot of technical knowledge that is used to offer a customized solution per network. Several excel files where composed in order to assist sales people to concentrate on their work. These files used to include hundreds of different components and complex formulas that assist in creating the correct configurations. On the other side, the production stuff used to manage their own configuration tables and files that used some other database. As customer service people usually handle orders for network upgrades and scaling, they developed their own set of files, tools and tables to manage the complex solutions and products. Obviously all this, with many non-controlled tools and off-line tools – led to many problems and difficulties that grew over time.
A decision was taken in the company to develop one centrally On-line tool that will be used by all departments – and "the Configurator" was born.
Now Sales people are using a Web based application to access the on-line customer-database, and quotes are created from there. Engineering department is using the same tool and database for producing exact configurations and BOM. Finance and Production department use information gathered in the DB to create accurate forecasts of required components. And Customer service uses the same Configurator for generating on-going offerings for customer requests.
The bottom line comes to the fact that Gilat customers, enjoy a faster and much more accurate response to their requirements and needs.
Oren Tayar
Marketing Product Manager
Gilat