Jack Henry and Associates is the leading provider of fully integrated, single-source technology systems to the nation´s financial industry. With 2,300 employees nationwide, the company provides 3,000 financial institutions with a complete range of processing solutions including core processing, internet banking, imaging and archiving, electronic funds transfer, teller automation, disaster recovery, network services, and voice response systems.

Growing Pains: Rising to The Challenge of Success
Jack Henry has grown from a $21M company to an almost $400M entity in nine years, applying pressure on every element of the business, including the sales and marketing operations. When tasked with building a sales organization that will allow the company to reach the billion-dollar mark, Chuck Schmit, Manager of Sales Operations drove Jack Henry to identify every possible obstacle to a more effective sales process, specifically:

• Efficiency and scalability of processes: By implementing an automated configuration, pricing, and proposal system, Jack Henry sought to reduce the time and resources needed to produce a high volume of complex proposals quickly.
• Consistency and accuracy in configuration and pricing:The company also wanted to develop proposals that met its customers´ needs at the outset and could be easily modified later to accommodate changes.
• Quality in communication: The company needed to establish appealing and compelling proposal templates for its sales proposal efforts.

Clark Rhoades, Manager of Sales Support, elaborates. "Our sales processes worked well, but we needed to ensure they could scale to support our planned growth. We also wanted to eliminate any silos of knowledge that could affect our ability to respond to opportunities. These two objectives led to the consideration of automating our configuration, pricing, and proposal processes. A side benefit we were looking for was the ability to change the profile of sales professionals hired at Jack Henry. Our desire is to hire industry experts and account professionals rather than technical salespeople."

Blue Martini Solution Design: Improving The Sales Process
Jack Henry evaluated a number of software vendors to meet the company´s exacting requirements:

• The successful system needed to house information about Jack Henry´s complex and constantly changing product lines as well as information about its preferred hardware partner, IBM.
• The system needed to accommodate the added complexity of an exacting array of federal and individual state banking regulations that had an effect on every configuration or proposal produced.
• The new system had to offer a simplified interface for technical, administrative or managerial staff to easily access information quickly.

"We were a breath away from building an internal solution," remembers Chuck Schmit, Manager of Sales Operations. Jack Henry began a vendor evaluation process, reviewing every aspect of Solution Design´s features, capabilities, architecture, and performance by creating a 100-page needs assessment document. They then committed to developing a pricing and document generation system by creating a detail workplan from the internal needs assessment.The company shortlisted and selected a Solution Design application from Blue Martini Software.

From the beginning, the Jack Henry implementation pushed the limits of the prospective system. Jack Henry´s configuration system required the loading of approximately 50 product lines, virtually hundreds of individual software products, with ten tiers of product variations. In addition the new configuration system would also need to warehouse the pricing database.

The next phase was incorporating the company´s signature product, Silverlake System ® into the Solution Design system. Jack Henry implemented additional features including complex pricing, documentation, and contract generation as well as designing a data warehouse to track and house all sales information. "It is a testament to Blue Martini´s services team that no one ever lost focus. Even when they acknowledged that this was among the most complex implementations they had ever undertaken, the team took the time to assure us that this project would result in the system we envisioned, wanted, and needed," states Rhoades.

Blue Martini Streamlines The Sales Process
Today Rhoades notes that the time to complete a complex proposal is much the same, approximately three days. However, the effort and personnel cost for the entire proposal process is now streamlined by one system and all the elements needed to create a proposal are housed in Blue Martini Solution Design. "Before we had lots of pieces-Word documents for a proposal template, Excel spreadsheets with pricing figures, and more Excel spreadsheets with software and hardware combinations. We´ve now moved past this pseudo-automation to a single source system, powered by Blue Martini," offers Rhoades.

Jack Henry has also experienced greater flexibility with its staff. Now, administrative staff can generate basic proposal documents, reducing the time, effort, and cost required to create certain elements of a proposal. In addition, the number of steps and individuals needed to prepare most proposals has been decreased, without a negative impact on accuracy or quality. "Essentially, all of our proposals are more accurate as a whole," notes Schmit.

A simple example presented by Rhoades most clearly characterized the difference Solution Design has made. "Before Solution Design, it was very common to have a prospect call us with a completely approved proposal-with the exception of one minor edit, such as an address change. Since every contract had to be redone, that one minor edit could take us 8 hours, the time it took to prepare the original proposal. Now with Solution Design, we enter the contact section, make the edit, and the system redoes the entire proposal-in minutes." Rhoades goes on to state how Solution Design has improved Jack Henry´s response time. "When a bank calls with a request for a proposal, we can create or modify a profile, version it, change it and/or re-price it numerous times all in one day, still hitting the deadline."

Blue Martini Offers Road Map to Continued Value
As Jack Henry works with its Solution Design system more, other benefits manifest themselves. The system allows the sales support team to generate PDFs, eliminating the need for sales managers or prospects to wait overnight or stand at fax machines to receive lengthy documents. Now, the company seeks to continue improving its proposal generation process and further develop its contract production.

In the meantime, Schmit feels confident that Solution Design helps Jack Henry solidify its place as a financial solutions market leader. "Market leadership is measured not only in the quality of your products, but also in the quality of your presence. With Blue Martini Solution Design, Jack Henry improved its customer responsiveness, essential to the continued growth of our sales volume. With our new proposal process, we now have the right tools to offer our products and services more appropriately, accurately, and quickly to our customers and prospects." he concludes.