John Wiley & Sons Finds Lost Dollars with Wintouch
John Wiley & Sons is the publisher of the popular "for Dummies" books and many other textbooks, journals and online professional publications.
Background/Business problem
Initial contact was a call to Touchtone by Ron Siclari, John Wiley's Director of Content & Database Management Technology, searching for a contact management solution.
John Wiley & Sons needed a global contact management application with central data repository for all customer contacts and customer history but that left a small footprint on the AS/400. Integration to existing applications was critical. Wiley was using JDE World for financials in offices around the globe but were in the process of moving to an Oracle database and still had pockets of Goldmine in various locations. They also needed Touchtone's ability to integrate with opportunity management applications on the
Internet built internally using Lansa.
John Wiley & Sons found only two or three contact management solutions specifically for the AS/400 and their solution needed to integrate with Lotus Notes email.
The UK group needed to be able to use the selected solution and all groups needed to know customer worth, sales projections, cross sell opportunities. After the initial Wintouch demo, John Wiley was interested in expanding from a simple contact management into full Sales Force Automation and, in addition, had an interest in Wintouch Lite, the disconnect/data-sync version of Wintouch. The first division launched was a pilot project with STM (Scientific Technical Medical) division.
Project information
John Wiley made the decision to go with Wintouch in April 2003 with soft launch in September 2003. The initial need was for a
universal customer database specifically for the 400 to replace existing pockets of Goldmine and Siebel, but further examination of Wintouch revealed very useful SFA features in addition to contact management. In October 2004 Wiley added a 5 user pilot project for the Higher Ed division and in May 2005 began implementation for Professional and Trade (P&T) division.
John Wiley was familiar with Touchtone and its products. They has been using QuestView, another Touchtone product, since 1996, so Siclari was confident in the level of service Touchtone could provide and trusted their ability on the 400.
Tangible results/benefits since installation of Wintouch
"With the information we are able to get from our Cognos Reports since installing Wintouch, we've been able to recover a chunk of change. We knew we were missing [opportunities] but Wintouch has more than paid for itself," says Ron Siclari. "Wintouch was the best thing that has happened to Wiley."