Conference ilbbak::us_sales_service

    Ahhh!  SBS.  The most dreaded TLA to any hard-working, dedicated sales
    support person.  There have been weeks of time wasted discussing this
    subject.  (I have spent many, many hours trying to improve how the
    system is used here, pretty much to no avail)  Before we go down a
    rat-hole, let me say that I believe the intent of SBS is valid and
    needed; what is lacking is a decent implementation, and they are
    working on that.
    
    Sales, in order to know the cost of sales, has to know how sales
    support is spending its time.  How much on administrative details (you
    know, SBS), learning, time spent working on proposals and/or demos, and
    so on.  This makes sense to me.  However, the only system they had that
    could even come close to being used for capturing this system was a
    system designed for PSS.  It did not work well for Sales Support. 
    After a year of *great* frustration on the part of the support people,
    they worked to improve at least the data entry portion.  They are still
    evaluating a totally new system for tracking this information.  I have
    no idea when it might materialize.
    
    Again, I believe that it makes sense to track time to be able to assign
    it to various categories.  (Maybe not to the level of detail that SBS
    currently can track it.)  But I also agree that it should not be such a
    drain on the people responsible for filling it out.  It should be able
    to handle special cases like yours, Jim, but also be flexible enough
    for those of us that support a couple dozen accounts (sometimes all in
    one week).  Hopefully, what they have learned from the great deal of
    flak they received during this past year will help them design a more
    useful, friendly system.
    
    tgc

    re: 1
    
    >[...] However, the only system they had that could even come close to
    >being used for capturing this system was a system designed for PSS.  It
    >did not work well for Sales Support [....] 
    
    Just so noone gets the wrong impression, It has not been my experience
    that it ever worked well for PSS either.

    .0 I think asks two different questions:
    
    	Is there a value in reporting time at some level of detail?
    
    	Is there a value in detailed reporting in SBS
    
    In my group we have used SBS to track time for identified prospects
    that we think may turn into SI/Large project opportunities.  This
    allows us to determine our costs so that we can recover same (with a
    profit) in pricing the final project.
    
    Detailed time reporting has also been very useful this year in
    educating sales on how much work can be generated from seemingly
    'simple' requests and how much of a team effort sales support really
    is.
    
    I don't care much for SBS but that is all we have now.
    
    
    Peter Dillard

Jim,

If you want to give feedback to someone who cares, I'm a pretty good 
choice.  I'm Planning and Operations manager for U.S. Sale Support and 
my group has responsibility for defining the business requirements for 
most U.S. Sales Support sponsored IS systems, which includes SBS.

As a field user of SBS for over six years I'm well aware of the problems 
with its implementation and am now actively working with field 
representatives and our IM&T organization to address these.

We're working from the same premise that several previous "noters" have 
expressed which is that there are sound business reasons for tracking 
where we spend our time and what we spend it doing.  Labor represents the 
greatest single expense to Digital for sales support.  Weekly tracking of 
it may not contribute to immediately lowering expenses or increasing 
revenues, but it does allow us to better understand our cost of sales and 
"productivity".  With this understanding, we can then make better 
decisions about resource allocations whic will then contribute to lower 
expenses and increased revenues.

SBS is recognized as a dated and inefficient tool for collecting this 
information.  We are in the midst of designing a new activity collecting 
system for introduction later this fiscal year which is planned to 
correct these deficiencies.  Our goal is to make it so simple and quick 
for you to document what you did and who you did it for, that these 
discussions will no longer be necessary.  Making it available as a 
PC-based tool for those who choose to use PCs will be an important part 
of the solution.

Hope this helps to let you see the light at the end of the tunnel ...

Jim,

Just a few more comments about the activity information you enter into 
SBS...

1.  Today it is used for:

    Reporting Sales Support expenses to Account P&Ls based on how direct 
    time is charged to accounts.

    Providing billing information for chargeable activities.

    Transferring fiscal expenses between Services and Sales when Services 
    does sales support work (windfall) and when Sales Support does 
    delivery work (reverse windfall) as required for external financial 
    reporting. (Cost of services vs Cost of product sales)

    Local management reporting for account planning, project tracking, 
    productivity tracking, overtime tracking, and input to performance 
    reviews.

    Trend reporting of a variety of Sales Support work/activity 
    indicators as part of the Sales Support Executive Support System 
    aimed at our senior managers.  This PC-based, graphics oriented 
    system is now being enhanced so that it can also be used by local 
    managers to provide additional usable information from your activity 
    entries.

2.  Recent, interim improvements to SBS

    If you haven't used the new Sales Support interface to SBS, called 
    ATS, try it.  It should be a choice on your SBS menu.  It allows you 
    to use a spread-sheet-like approach to entering your time, although 
    you still must use a VT-compatible device.  You can copy pass entries 
    and easily update the critical fields which change most often, e.g. 
    the number of hours. 

    Consider using ATS instead of the default record which you mentioned 
    in your note.  

    Being dedicated to a single account, you are in a minority within 
    Sales Support, (however, I noticed your ELF profile indicates you 
    support both XEROX and JAMES RIVER).  If you rely on a single default 
    record entry per month to SBS, you will be overcharging the account 
    you support.  In FY92 this occurred since the non-direct charges of 
    others in your cost center were allocated to the account you charged 
    with your single entry.  In FY93 we've moved to charging for only the 
    direct, customer-specific time. However, it is uplifted by a factor 
    of 50% to account for the average amount of vacation, sick, training, 
    and other non-specific account activities.

    Using ATS you can easily copy previous entries for both direct and 
    indirect time and update them as needed to reflect what you actually 
    did.  It's also possible to enter a month's activity at a time, so if 
    what you do really doesn't change that much, you could use the entry 
    system only once each month. 

    Regards ...7    									 

Re: .4 & .5: Thank you, I'm feeling better about where you are heading with 
             this issue and why we need to capture this data.

regards,

Jim

    Why do we track Sales Support time but not Sales time?      
    
    I understand all the stated reasons for understanding our cost of sales
    and all that.  But my time as a sales support person is only part of that 
    labor cost.
    
    Somebody told me that Sales must also account for 40 hours per week.  I
    asked a few sales reps about this, it was news to them.  Maybe their
    data entry is automated?  Maybe we make assumptions they will spend all
    their time on accounts to which they are assigned?
    
    I don't want to start WWIII here, just curious.
    
    - Greg Scott

    If a new SBS data entry system is developed, I strongly suggest testing
    it with a few live one's in a few different sites before broad
    deployment.
    

    re .7
    
    Sales time is tracked but in a different system (Effort Tracking
    System).
    
    I have seen cases where the secretaries and even finance enters time
    for the reps.  This may be why the reps don't know about it.
    
    Peter

    That's got to be a real accurate way of capturing information.  `the
    reps don't know about it'.  And I thought the numbers in SBS were bad!
    
    tgc

    re: .10
    
    Right. I'd guess the two methods have comparable "accuracy."