Boundaries are disappearing. Businesses operate with fewer borders. People everywhere communicate more freely and more frequently than ever before. The e-world. A trillion dollar global communications market. It’s today’s world.

Global Crossing Ltd., (NYSE:GX) recognized that to make it all work – to make the global economy soar – today’s world needed something better than yesterday’s networks. By mid-2001, Global Crossing will have more than 100,000 route miles, reaching five continents, 27 countries, and more than 200 major cities, thereby providing integrated telecommunications solutions over the world’s most extensive global IP-based fiber-optic network. This unmatched network lets Global Crossing offer customers, many of whom are the world’s largest corporations, a constantly expanding suite of services, providing a full range of managed data and voice communications solutions, throughout the Americas, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region.

Alternately, Global Crossing recognized that today’s unique business challenges required something better than yesterday’s standard software programs. Which is why they embraced NDA’s Account Management System (AMS) as the right solution to tackle the new economy’s demanding business environment.

Frederick Paine is a Senior Manager of Infrastructure Product Development in the Global Product Development Group. Fred discusses the business challenges his Global Crossing team faced and how AMS addressed those needs and exceeded expectations.

AMS Product Scope and Architecture

At Global Crossing, Account Management System (AMS) is a consultative selling solution deployed to decrease the sales cycle time by providing up front validations for network designs and pricing. The AMS design also allows each Global Crossing Product Manager to have complete control over their products’ pricing strategies, providing the necessary granularity to achieve profit maximization. AMS also supports extensive reporting structures allowing senior management to snapshot pre-sales trends and obtain information down to the individual and circuit level.

The current design of AMS is entirely web based, built on highly redundant software and hardware architectures and accessible from any location within the Global Crossing Intranet.

The Business Challenge

Global Crossing's product sets and customer base has been expanding at an ever-increasing rate. With this expansion the functionality and complexity required for managing customer relationships, pricing and the telecom infrastructure has also increased tremendously.

The AMS Solution

AMS provides a centralized data repository where all prices, discount structures, business rules and promotional plans are stored. Any modifications performed at this singular data location automatically are in place at the very next login by the Sales Rep. AMS provides a centralized control structure for pricing for all data products.

By providing a standardized legally approved proposal document Global Crossing is able to present a singular professional image to all our customers. Moreover, AMS provides a singular data storage site from which Pre-Sales demographics can be obtained. This data is also stored in standardized corporate approved formats (HTML, Word, Excel, Visio).

AMS provides a consistent informational sharing schema and is a totally electronic solution. Complete information can easily be shared throughout the organization via the software itself or general business mail tools.

AMS also provides built-in Engineering rules that provide up-front validation preventing many common errors and increasing the accuracy of the solution. This up-front validation thus greatly speeds up the validation process, as fewer checks need to be performed. AMS electronically submits the order information into the backend support systems eliminating completely the need for printed order forms. This greatly reduced the sales cycle time as there is no longer a need for any manual re-entry of information and as such, many errors are avoided.

Selecting AMS

Global Crossing identified a number of factors in selecting NDA as their vendor:

1. Reputation - NDA is world-renowned and provides data support for all major telecom carriers.
2. Cost - The AMS solution provides a complete CRM (Customer Relationship Management) package specifically tailored to the telecom environment costing a percentage of what other CRM packages of this caliber require.
3. People - NDA is staffed by some of the best minds in the software and telecom industries. The majority of NDA's staff have advanced degreed (PhD's) as well as certifications in all the major development environments.
4. Open Architecture - AMS is designed in a modular format allowing for easy integration into existing legacy systems (Back Office). AMS also provides a simple, open interface for either sending or receiving data in many formats including XML, HTML, Microsoft Excel, MS Access, and flat files.
5. Non-proprietary Technologies - NDA utilizes only standard off the shelf technologies (IIS, Oracle, JAVA, HTML, etc.).
6. Flexibility - NDA customizes their product to exactly meet the requirements of all Global Crossing Business groups worldwide.

Objective Achievements

Business Achievements

• Reduced front end sales cycle times
• Reduced price quoting timelines dramatically
• Reduced error rates. Positive impacts to customer service, billing and provisioning
• Decreased engineering validation timelines
• Single point of control over product profit/loss, managing discounts and promotions, and tracking /managing pre-sales activities

Cost Saving Achievements

• Sales Support – accuracy reduces validation efforts
• Complete electronic data flow from pre-sales to provisioning and billing creates time savings for BA’s & materials
• Reduction in proliferation of previous pricing toolsets
• Provisioning accuracy

Productivity Achievements

• Sales Engineers workload reduced dramatically by coded engineering validation
• Professional proposal and custom image increased sale closing probability
• Greater efficiency and shorter turnaround time due to on-line tracking and customer environment knowledge

Conclusions

NDA’s AMS has been in full production supporting the entire Global Crossing sales force since the end of 1999. Global Crossing will continue to expand the global AMS install base and further integrate the AMS solution into more and more of the operations infrastructure. Furthermore, we plan to continue to expand the capabilities of AMS as they have shown tremendous capabilities to integrate their product with other vendors and internal systems.