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JAS Forwarding Discovers the True Power of CRM

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Customer: JAS Forwarding Headquarters: Atlanta Business: International freight forwarding Challenge: Improving sales visibility across the company Solution: Working with Touchtone to implement and customize Wintouch CRM to improve visibility among salespeople and company management, and to seize additional sales opportunities Hardware: An IBM Power 770 Software: Touchtone’s Wintouch, Oracle’s EnterpriseOne ERP application and IBM’s DB2 for i

Any company worth its salt knows the importance of good customer relations—and that’s why customer-relationship management (CRM) tools have become indispensable in many offices.

But not all CRM applications are alike. Some are simple spreadsheet-like lists of who’s who, with physical and email addresses, phone numbers and other contact information. Others are behemoths containing everything about individual clients, sometimes to the point of information overload.

Power users, however, know that too little or too much information can be a bad thing. They need more graceful tools that can help them granularly connect the relevant dots, which may lead to additional selling opportunities. Unfortunately, many of these tools lack the industry-specific qualities that could optimize their power.

That’s in part why JAS Forwarding Inc. decided to partner with Touchtone Corporation when deciding on a CRM package. Not only is Touchtone’s Wintouch CRM application a more-than-capable solution, but Touchtone itself worked closely with JAS to make sure Wintouch was configured according to JAS’ industry-specific and internal needs.

“I’ve seen other freight forwarders’ CRM systems. ... none of them come even close to what we have today.”
—Stefano Redditi, VP of sales and marketing, JAS

And the results have been nothing less than spectacular, says Stefano Redditi, JAS’ vice president of sales and marketing. “In the past we were somewhat reactive, with more than 40 salespeople in the U.S. alone having to submit weekly reports via email,” he says. “Before we could identify any additional sales opportunities, we had to process each individual report, and that took time and effort. Now I can run a report and immediately see what’s happening with an almost live pipeline view of prospects and customers.”

A Full Opportunity Pipeline

Founded in1978 in Milan, JAS now has its worldwide and U.S. offices headquartered in Atlanta. The company is global in scope, with additional offices in Asia, Europe and South America. No surprise, given the business it’s in: air and ocean freight forwarding.

But that description doesn’t do JAS justice. In addition to the general cargo division, JAS has three verticals: oil and energy, projects and government logistics. JAS’ sales force is organized accordingly. Within the general cargo division, specialized teams target small and medium enterprises, specific trade lanes and global accounts.

“To put it simply, our core business is the international movement of freight. Being a nonasset-based freight forwarder, we don’t own any ships or planes, but we do ‘own’ space with all major airlines and steamship lines. For example, we’ll sign a contract with a steamship line for the movement of containers from China to the U.S. Part of that contract will indicate how many container spaces on each vessel will be allocated to JAS for a period of time, which is usually one year. These are large contracts for well over 20,000 container spaces per year each. We do the same with airlines. Then we approach our customers so they can take advantage of our space and value-added services,” Redditi says.

These services include helping clients on either end of the journey ensure clearance and customs compliance with government agencies and helping with simple or complex supply chains. JAS is a one-stop shop for importers or exporters.

Supporting all of this activity is an IBM Power Systems* 770 backbone (recently consolidated from several older systems running IBM i) that runs several proprietary applications, DB2* for i and Oracle’s EnterpriseOne ERP application, which is used for accounting.

The homegrown applications, which act as the nerve center for JAS, were developed in lieu of a packaged solution because they offer the company greater flexibility when dealing with the many entities with which it comes into contact. “When considering the movement of freight, you also have to consider the unique requirements of the countries we’re shipping in and out of. And to my knowledge, there are no freight forwarders that have a true single system that handles everything. That would be a huge challenge,” Redditi says.

Another huge challenge was how the company was implementing CRM. JAS had no integrated system to gather information from salespeople. Instead, its approach was somewhat piecemeal, with reports sent to the corporate office weekly. As a result, the company was managing its sales force based only on results.

“That was the only way to analyze their performance. Most importantly, there was no efficient way to direct them on specific opportunities or trade lanes,” Redditi recalls. “Some people were using limited CRM systems to manage customer relationships, but that was essentially a simple database residing on individual PCs—something the company didn’t want.”

And with no integration of information, it was hard to spot further sales opportunities within single complex accounts, which might be managed by several different people, sometimes on opposite sides of the globe. This resulted in fragmented information and missed opportunities.

“Say Company ABC has ocean freight from Shanghai to Los Angeles. It may also have airfreight from Frankfurt to Atlanta. And then it may also have exports from Chicago to New Delhi. These are different opportunities for us. But because the best thing we had were weekly reports in either email or Excel format—and no real centralized repository for this information—we were missing opportunities,” Redditi says.

Given how many of JAS’ customers operate, this was a huge issue. “For any prospect or customer,” he further explains, “it was impossible to identify the sales stage they were in for each opportunity. We needed a full pipeline view at the opportunity level. In addition, we needed a system that was fully integrated with our operation system so that we could see actual shipments being handled.”

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