Hansen has great customers. One of these customers graciously invited us to be part of a day where it kicked off and rallied its leaders and stakeholders around its service delivery transformation project for its new generation of digital products.
Pop-up stand deployed, rolling presentation set up, account managers present, complimentary pens at the ready, Hansen showed up in force.
By way of background, we’re working for this customer with some of our strong SI partners like PWC and Infosys to implement Hansen Catalog, Hansen CPQ and Hansen OM as foundational elements to their new architecture supporting service delivery transformation for their current and next set of digital products.
There was a great turnout that featured workshops, demonstrations and partner vendors (like us) who were more than happy to answer the question “So, what’s your role in this program?” When I had the chance to answer, I explained to the heads nodding politely between sips of coffee, what the three Hansen products would do in the new architecture, which went something like:
“Hansen CPQ will define how you sell, be the basis for your reseller portal, and enable the same sales processes and quotes across your sales channels, true omni-channel as we call it…”
“Hansen OM, that will orchestrate all the orders from your reseller portal and give you the ability to reduce order errors which can slow down order-to-cash…”
“Hansen Catalog, that will define your business and all the products – the products you have now and the ones you want to sell next – and as a data store, be shared with every system in the new architecture – it will be that thing your colleagues call the “unified product catalog.”
I thought my elevator pitches were equally as effective for each product, but it was those last three words that elicited the most pronounced nodding and coffee drinking in my audience.
All the products were demoed during the day and Hansen Catalog, their “UPC,” made the biggest impression on the stakeholders. This very unscientific poll tells me that the people who’ll be involved in the day to day workings of this transformation project understand just how critical a single well-managed catalog will be to the success of the transformation project.
They may have just been polite to the makers of the catalog (us!), but I think the sentiment was genuine as these were the things I heard:
“We love that you can configure products and not have to program them.”
“New offers will be immediately available in the portal, no waiting.”
“We can rationalise products to a reasonable number, not the 4,000 we have today.”
And, rather powerfully –
“It’s a real, proven product, not like custom-built software that we’ve struggled with over the last four years.”
So, not very scientific, but it’s clear: transforming to create and deliver the next generation of products and services requires that you put the right catalog in place. Hansen is proud to say that we’re going to deliver exactly that for this and the rest of our customers.
Stephen Krajewski
Director of Product Marketing