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BlackBerry Case Study - Asset and Finance

BNP Paribas lease group provides real-time financial
simulations in the field using the BlackBerry solution.

By providing its 200 sales representatives with BlackBerry® smartphones, BNP Paribas’ has increased responsiveness and productivity. The deployment has also had a positive impact on the company’s corporate image.

The Challenge

BNP Paribas Lease Group (BPLG) is the commercial equipment financing subsidiary of the BNP Paribas group. Its 200 sales representatives compete in a highly competitive marketplace. “We have many strengths, including our business expertise,” explains François-Régis Martin, BPLG Deputy Director of Marketing, “But such a competitive market puts a premium on responsiveness – the company that replies fastest with the best offer stands a good chance of winning.”

BPLG equipped its sales representatives with PDAs in 2002. The PDAs came with a simulator application that enabled the sales reps to respond to customer queries in the field in real time. By 2004 the PDAs were obsolete and needed replacing. The simulator application, which had been developed in-house, also needed to be upgraded to keep pace with evolutions in process management. BPLG decided that the upgrade was an opportunity to move to a better technology.

The Solution

BPLG opted for BlackBerry smartphones over traditional PDAs and decided to redevelop the simulator in Java. BlackBerry push-technology was a decisive factor. As Martin points out, “Our objective has always been to increase responsiveness to give our customers an answer in the field as soon as possible. The PDAs, however, were not connected to our system. Sales reps had to stop by the office to synchronise their devices.” BPLG realised that manual synchronisation was a time waster. “The ability of BlackBerry to keep sales reps connected 24/7 greatly appealed to us,” says Martin. At the end of 2004, the company began developing a new simulator for BlackBerry smartphones with Orange and Mosaic Développement, a service provider that had worked in close collaboration with Research In Motion (RIM) on the development of the application. The first pilot application, designed in only three months, was soon tested.

The new business application was more powerful than the previous version and integrated seamlessly into the BlackBerry solution. It enabled a sales representative in the field to simulate financing solutions using the latest system updates (financing rates, insurance costs, etc.), which are automatically pushed to the BlackBerry smartphone.

Sales representatives are able to draw up a financing proposal on the fly. Once a proposal is approved, it is converted into a PDF file and sent by email to the customer for final signature. The sales assistant also receives the document immediately by email. François-Régis Martin explains, “the sales representatives can manage the whole process, from the proposal to the contract, using their BlackBerry smartphone.” The success of this first trial led to the solution being extended to the entire sales force.

The Benefits

“The BlackBerry solution ticked all the boxes,” François-Régis Martin says. “The business application demonstrates the benefit of this mobile solution and the BlackBerry smartphones integrate into the group’s security policy. For example, the user must regularly log in, data communications are encrypted and the terminal can be remotely deactivated if lost or stolen.” The immediate advantages of the solution also helped François-Régis Martin to demonstrate the return on investment of the deployment: “The gain in responsiveness and productivity is tremendous. Sales representatives can work more flexibly and they are never caught out by rapidly changing financial data. Moreover, the BlackBerry  smartphones enhance our corporate image. It gives us a clear lead in an industry in which responsiveness and professionalism are crucial.” Implementing the BlackBerry solution has also helped to improve communication between the sales representatives and their assistants, especially with shared calendars. BPLG is very satisfied with the first stage of this deployment and intends to go further: “Once you discover the kinds of applications that can be developed for BlackBerry smartphones, many paths open up. We are already thinking about application improvements, such as sending the contract rather than a proposal directly to the smartphone. We also want to integrate the BlackBerry solution into our CRM system. In the future sales representatives will have the  opportunity to further personalise their offer and be even more competitive,” François-Régis Martin concludes.

For further information: www.blackberry.com/go/success