Adobe Success Story

To create a dynamic product selector application that seamlessly transfers pre-qualified customers to appropriate resellers for sales transaction and fulfillment.

Benefits

· Significant boost in application performance
· Faster time to market
· Short learning curve - HTML designers were developing ColdFusion applications in one week
· Streamlined sales process
· Easily ported existing ColdFusion applications to the Wireless Application Protocol.

Project Details

Since its founding in 1981 by three MIT engineers, American Power Conversion (APC) has evolved to become a leading provider of global, end-to-end AC- and DC-based power solutions, including surge suppressors, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), power conditioning equipment, DC power systems, and precision cooling equipment for Nonstop Networking�.

By improving the manageability, availability, and performance of sensitive electronic, network, communication, and industrial equipment of all sizes, APC sets the standard for high-quality power protection solutions from the desktop to the data center to entire facilities.

Today, with offices throughout the world and manufacturing facilities on three continents, APC is a billion-dollar company shipping products to over 120 countries and employing more than 6,000 people worldwide.

One of the significant challenges APC faces in its business operations is the increasing size and complexity of its 8,000-SKU product line. Operating in so many countries means APC must manufacture products that support dozens of power requirements and plug types. What's more, selecting the right APC product typically required a consultant to check through hundreds of pages of manuals to determine the customer's anticipated power draw and factor in "runtime"—the amount of emergency backup time a customer requires to successfully and safely power down vulnerable equipment.

"With so many variables, product selection became a very difficult manual process," said Dave Young, director of Internet development for APC. "Over the years, we'd gathered power-draw information for tens of thousands of machines and computer components. For example, I could be using a Compaq Proliant computer with a ViewSonic 15-inch LCD monitor, a CD-ROM drive, and a ModemBlaster PC Card modem. I need one hour of backup time. And I'm from Germany. What APC product is right? We needed a way to enable customers to self-select their product and felt a Web application could greatly simplify and shorten this process."

Migrating from a simple HTML to a rich Web site with dynamic interaction meant APC needed to upgrade its development environment, eventually selecting Macromedia ColdFusion. "ColdFusion is easy enough for a new developer to pick up and use within a few days," said Young, "but it's sophisticated enough to give real power to experienced users. ColdFusion gives us a real ROI on our development team."

An Online, Self-Service Product Selector

Using ColdFusion, a team of two developers created APC's product selector application. The application pulls data from Microsoft SQL 2000 tables that contain power draws and runtime specs and enables site visitors to use a series of pull-down menus and check boxes to describe their configurations and requirements. In just minutes, a customer can have a specific SKU that meets his or her specific needs and that conforms to the specified country's power environment.

According to Young, this provides important advantages. "Now our customers can come to our site and find out exactly what they need," he said. "For a product line as broad as ours, that's a significant milestone that accelerates the sales process."

However, APC soon noted that, while site traffic was quite strong, the rates of conversion from visitor to customer were not as high as possible. "For virtually all small- and medium-sized enterprises, our sales are conducted through independent channels," Young said. "The problem is, our resellers represent many other products—they couldn't possibly know as much as we do about our products. We had to solve the disconnect between a prospect visiting our site for information and then getting to a reseller site for purchase."

Shop APC: Converting Interest Into Sales

The solution: building an e-commerce function that takes advantage of the site's product selector while preserving the reseller relationship. The result: Shop APC, an e-commerce site that educates the prospect and seamlessly transfers him or her—prequalified—to an appropriate reseller for the sales transaction and fulfillment.

"When a prospect visits our site, we know what country they're from, what products they need, and the quantities they want," Young said. "We've added a traditional e-commerce shopping cart so that the user interacts in a classically interactive manner with the site. The difference is, when the customer checks out,' we transparently hand them off to the appropriate reseller partner using an XML data stream.

"It's a win for everyone—the customer gets the right information about our products, the reseller gets a prequalified lead who's ready to buy, and we receive complete contact information on the eventual end user for after-market activities."

Another key aspect of the APC Web strategy was ensuring multi-country, localized access to the site. "If a user is in Germany, we can present the site information in German," explained Young. "When we developed the site, we externalized all text strings in a phrasebook database. Now, based on the country code, we select the tables for the text strings and dynamically build the screens in any of six languages."

Wireless Applications Help Accelerate Sales

As a final measure, APC has added three wireless applications to help streamline the sales process as well. The APC development team was able to simply port existing ColdFusion Web applications to the Wireless Application Protocol by using ColdFusion Studio's suite of tools for working with Wireless Markup Language (WML).

Now, APC resellers can use WAP-enabled cell phones to find names of pre- and post-sales reps, provide information and assistance and automatically dial them as well. Resellers can access the product configurator—right in a customer's conference room on a WAP phone—to keep the sales process moving forward. Simultaneously, they can enter the customer's e-mail address and request that information about the suggested product solution be sent directly to the customer.

An Easy Upgrade to ColdFusion Server 5

With the release of Macromedia ColdFusion Server 5, APC was eager to upgrade its applications to take advantage of both improved performance and new features such as user-defined functions and "query of queries."

"We have five production servers," explained Gerald Walsh, Web developer for APC, "and, frankly, the upgrade couldn't have gone smoother. We upgraded one server at a time by taking it off the cluster and upgrading it offline. It took about a day for each server and we had the whole site upgraded within a week without any interruption or impact.

"ColdFusion 5 has given us a significant performance increase. We run a 'slow-page' report on pages that take more than 10 seconds to load. The first two weeks after the full upgrade was completed we had no slow pages on the report and overall, our performance has been excellent. We've started to make use of the user-defined functions and they're quite easy to work with as well."

Site Summary

American Power Conversion
132 Fairgrounds Road
West Kingston, RI

—Macromedia products: 40 copies of ColdFusion Studio 4.5.2 and 12 ColdFusion Server 5 Enterprise

—Hardware: Not disclosed

—Operating system: For ColdFusion Enterprise: Microsoft Windows 2000; For ColdFusion Studio: Microsoft Windows NT 4.0

—Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2000

—Size of DB: 12.5GB

—Development Team: 22 full-time developers

—Site Traffic: 1.1 million unique visits per month

—Service Plan: Gold Support

—Benefits of Macromedia:

Short Learning Curve—"It's easy to learn, yet powerful for experienced programmers."
Application Performance—"ColdFusion 5 has brought significant performance gains."
Rapid Development—"It doesn't take long to develop in ColdFusion, which gives us a rapid time to market."

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