Hewlett-Packard (HP) serves a worldwide customer base that ranges from home offices to multinational enterprises. An international provider of computing and imaging solutions and services, HP´s Enterprise Solution Partner Division partners with independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other mission-critical business application solutions (including hardware and software) to large, global enterprise customers. The HP Enterprise Solution Partner Division markets enterprise solutions with its ISV partners through HP and partner sales channels. The HP Enterprise Solution Partner Division´s sales process is very complex, because it combines software from multiple ISVs and hardware to meet unique customer needs. To manage this complexity and to reduce sales cycle time and costs, HP chose to implement Array Configuration sold by our partner Blue Martini. The results to date for HP since the implementation are many and significant:

• Reduction of engineering hours per proposal from the 17- to 33-hour range to less than an hour
• Reduction of proposal iteration time from as much as two weeks to less than an hour
• Increase in productivity per person at an estimated 400 percent to 800 percent
• Reduced exposure of typical $2,000 to $4,000 pre-sales investment for proposal iterations
• Actual proposal generation costs reduced to $100 from $1,000.
• Actual proposal generation time reduced to 30 minutes - down from the two- to 14-day range
• Improvement of proposal quality, consistency and accuracy

The return on investment (ROI) for this approach was quick to materialize. HP achieved ROI from its solution in approximately 2.5 months.