Alcatel-Lucent Cuts Creation Time for Complex Sales Proposals by 73 Percent with Sant ProposalMaster

Current Status

The bids and proposals department at Alcatel-Lucent is tasked with preparing hundreds of sales proposals each year that provide critical information on more than 500 service offerings. To ensure the greatest impact, proposals must contain the right information, and present it with a look and feel that is consistent with corporate marketing requirements. Alcatel-Lucent meets this objective with Sant's ProposalMaster--and has been doing so since 2005. Equally important, Alcatel-Lucent has cut the time it takes to create complex sales proposals by 73 percent; for simple sales documents, creation time has been slashed 56 percent.

Original Challenge

Before implementing ProposalMaster--and before their merger with Alcatel-- Lucent used to prepare each proposal manually, relying on information provided by the individuals responsible for each service addressed in the proposal. There were several problems with this approach. First, since most proposals address multiple services, the bids and proposals department spent an undue amount of time simply tracking down information. Second, the content provided by service provider groups within Lucent was inconsistent in terms of the type of information included, and its style and presentation. And finally, it was difficult to complete impressive personalized proposals on deadline.

"Without a centralized, comprehensive repository of content detailing the many services our company provides, we were left having to cut, paste, and consolidate information that was written by different people, with different writing styles, and that was presented in different formats," explains Amanda Salvarani, Bids and Proposals Manager. "In short, the process was a nightmare."

Solution

Lucent decided to streamline sales proposal development activities by implementing a solution that could store and automatically assemble standardized and structured content in pre-defined document types. The solution they selected was Sant ProposalMaster. "This solution," Salvarani says, "met our functional requirements as well as the stringent security demands mandated by our IT department."

A robust security capability was critical to Lucent because they had a large, globally distributed user base and wanted to implement role-based restrictions to content, document types, and activities. According to Salvarani, the Sant solution was unique in delivering this capability.

By the time of the Alcatel-Lucent merger in 2006, Lucent had so much content stored in Sant ProposalMaster, and was so satisfied with its security and performance, that the new company decided to continue its reliance on the solution.

"After the merger, we were able to stay with ProposalMaster because it easily scaled to meet our expanded requirements in the areas of content volume and number of users," Salvarani says. "The solution continues to let us separate content types such as service descriptions, tasks, and terms and conditions for a larger universe of services, while also enabling us to support more document types." Currently Alcatel-Lucent relies on four separate document types; capabilities document, statement of work, high-level proposal, and detailed proposal.

"With Sant's ProposalMaster, authorized users are presented with a list of services we offer and they simply select the ones required by the individual requesting the sales document, in the order specified," "Salvarani says. "ProposalMaster does the rest, automatically creating the proposal according to the predefined document type. As a result, we can now complete client-focused, personalized documents in just 1.2 hours instead of the 4.4 hours it used to take, and simpler sales documents in 48 minutes instead of the 108 minutes it took before implementing Sant."

The bottom line: For the 1218 documents Alcatel-Lucent's Bids and Proposals Department completed last year, the company saved an estimated 2560 man-hours.

The Future with Sant

Alcatel-Lucent recently completed implementation of the latest version of Sant ProposalMaster (v8.2) to enable integration with a legacy pricing system and further shorten proposal creation time. In addition, according to Salvarani, the company is considering leveraging their Sant investment to include preparation of product-related sales proposals in addition to those for services. Alcatel-Lucent is also piloting RFPMaster and PresentationBuilder in trial projects.

About Alcatel-Lucent

Offering voice, data, and video communications service in more than 130 countries Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the most experienced global services organization in the industry. The company achieved revenues of Euro 16.98 billion in 2008 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris.

Alcatel-Lucent is the trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: www.alcatel-lucent.com.