Success story
Hewlett-Packard, Japan
Company background
Hewlett-Packard is a global technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing, imaging and printing.
HP Japan’s Proposal Center consists of a team of Presales Engineers that support the Sales Division through efficient preparation of customer proposals. The primary aim of the Proposal Center is to improve customer satisfaction and build quality by solving customers’ small, everyday problems, one by one.
The challenge
The Proposal Center team focuses on creating simple proposal documents that add genuine value for HP customers. It is essential that all proposals be delivered promptly, so the team constantly strives to improve the efficiency of proposal preparation.
It is important to strengthen the visual element of proposals, in order to ensure that they look professional and are easy for the customer to understand. This typically requires the inclusion of many graphics, resulting in proposal file sizes that can easily exceed several megabytes.
Large files such as these can be difficult to send via email and may be rejected by the customer’s email server. Even when file transmission is successful, sending overly large files is burdensome for the customer and it is considered good manners to reduce the size of email attachments as much as possible, but without sacrificing quality or clarity.
The strategy
Reducing proposal file sizes by manually optimizing the graphics contained within them was an unrealistic long-term option, due to the time, effort and skill involved in doing so. HP Japan therefore chose to deploy NXPowerLite Desktop Edition to all Presales Engineers.
We sampled the trial version of NXPowerLite and quickly saw that it was easy to use and had a large compression capability, so we decided to adopt it for the whole department.
Kumiko Matsuno, Pre-Sales Shared Services, HP Japan
The result
All Presales Engineers now use NXPowerLite to optimize their proposals before sending them to customers. The smaller file sizes have made it much easier for customers to receive and view their proposals without having to compromise on quality, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.
Additional benefit areas
NXPowerLite has increased productivity in the creation of proposals. Presales Engineers need no longer be concerned with the time-consuming process of manually optimizing graphics before inserting them into their proposals.
Quality standards can now be easily maintained by specifying which compression settings Presales Engineers use when optimizing proposals.
Communication efficiency has been improved. During the preparation of a proposal, project stakeholders regularly send drafts to each other via email. Large file sizes had previously made such exchanges very inefficient. Additionally, NXPowerLite has maximized the effectiveness of internal network resources, as smaller files are less of a burden on the network.
Finally, NXPowerLite has significantly reduced storage and backup requirements. Reducing proposal file sizes has led to increased server disk capacity and reduced the amount of time taken to create backups.
Conclusions
NXPowerLite has contributed to greater efficiencies and improved customer satisfaction in a variety of areas. Presales Engineers can focus on preparing proposals without worrying about file size, and proposals can be shared between project stakeholders quickly and easily.
By reducing files from several megabytes to several hundred kilobytes, HP Japan can confidently send them to their customers.
Moreover, since the optimized files remain in their original format, customers can easily open them without requiring any kind of special viewer or decompression utility.
HP Japan prides itself on supplying customers with the latest in IT infrastructure and solutions. Naturally we want to use our own network and server resources as effectively as possible. Reducing the file size of proposals has improved customer satisfaction, increased company productivity and enabled effective use of our network.
Takayuki Shigematsu, Advanced Technology Solutions Manager, HP Japan
