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We spoke to Fredric Berling, Beijer's Notes
developer, about his his experience of implementing
SWING Integrator for Notes & Office into the Quotation
and Calculation application.
What Business challenge did
you face with Lotus Notes?
As a Notes developer, I have been looking for a good way to integrate
Office documents into Lotus Notes for a long time.
The lack of Office integration became a real problem when I was
asked to develop a database for creating calculations for quotations.
These calculations were to be carried out in Excel and stored in
a Notes database together with the quotation that was created in Word.
Why did you choose SWING Integrator?
A business partner, who was also a Notes developer, suggested I
try SWING Integrator. After making an in-depth analysis of the products
on the market claiming to meet my needs and personally evaluating
some of these products, I came to the conclusion that SWING Integrator
had the functionality I required and was perfect for this application.
As we use many different platforms in our day-to-day operations,
SWING Integrator's ease of installation also contributed to the
decision.
Before this solution was developed, employees stored MS Office
documents on a NetWare server, which proved to be very inefficient.
Now, the solution is based solely around SWING Integrator.
Could you describe the application you created using the
SWING Integrator?
SWING Integrator provides me with numerous advantages, but the
ability to save back to Notes beats everything. In our application
we populate many fields taken from the Notes database (our customer
database is on AS/400). The information travels from AS/400 via
Notrix to Notes database down to the Excel calculation and then
to Word document, all via SWING. With this, information is constantly
updated via Notrix from our AS/400 application, therefore when a
new company is created in AS/400 the sales-personal can within minutes
create a calculation for that company in Excel and replicate it
to his/her computer.
Notes has limitations in its calculation capabilities, and therefore
with the SWING Integrator, employees are able to create Excel calculations
and transfer these calculated figures to the Notes document for
further processing. In terms of Quotations, employees have follow-up
notifications of their customer sales-sheets and finally a more
efficient and effective administration due to a centralized company
template.
A Notes database holds all our customer information. When it is
time to write a quotation to a customer, the sales representative
creates a child-document to the customer-document called a ‘Sales
Sheet’. In this ‘Sales Sheet’, the sales employee
creates different office documents connected to the project. Usually,
this is a calculation in Excel and a quotation in Word. At times,
a PowerPoint presentation occurs describing the products the customer
wants to buy.
On the issue of field exchange within Notes Document, all customer
information is exchanged into the Office document (Address, name,
contact person, etc). When the Word Quotation is created, a field
indicating the creation date is exchanged back to Notes (indicating
that the quotation was ready at that specified date). In the Notes
document a couple of products are chosen and their names and prices
are exchanged into the Excel calculation document. When the calculation
is complete, the total cost is exchanged back to the Notes Document.
How does SWING Software add value at Beijer Electronics
AB?
This solution brings together ALL the sales information we have
on a customer, which is connected to the customer document. Before
we introduced this solution, employees really didn’t know
where to find what they were looking for, as information was everywhere
and nowhere at the same time. With our centralized customer database,
all our offices can now see all the other offices' quotations, and
our employees can now follow up quotations with newsletters generated
in Notes that are sent to the customer's primary sales contact.
A further benefit is that we can now see statistics on any product
group, region, sales person or date in a variety of formats.
SWING has enabled Beijer Electronic to achieve their vision of
making automation simple and offered them the chance to work more
closely with their customers.
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