Adobe is the global leader in digital marketing and digital media solutions. Adobe’s tools and services allow customers to create groundbreaking digital content, deploy it across media and devices, measure and optimize it over time and achieve greater business success. When Adobe needed high-performance business rules management and data delivery capabilities for its worldwide sales organization, it turned to Progress® Corticon®, the market-leading platform for automating and executing business changes used by more than 500 customers worldwide. Corticon enables Adobe to react quickly to go-to-market and business process changes within the sales organization.
Keeping a Sales Force Aligned With a New Cloud Delivery Model at Adobe
Adobe’s commitment to revolutionizing how the world engages with ideas and information is as strong today as it was when the company was founded in 1982. Over the years, Adobe has helped redefine industries with innovative technologies and products and today Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. Content built and optimized with Adobe products is everywhere you look—from websites, video games and smartphones to televisions, tablets and beyond. Adobe Creative Cloud offers the most innovative tools for creating digital media, while the Adobe Marketing Cloud delivers groundbreaking solutions for data-driven marketing. The company’s leadership in these two categories, Digital Media and Digital Marketing, provides customers with a real competitive advantage and positions Adobe for continued growth well into the future.
Given the size, complexity and geographic distribution of Adobe’s sales force and product lines, maintaining the rules needed for accurate territory assignment and sales-lead distribution was a significant challenge.
Increased Productivity and Functionality
To meet this challenge, Adobe chose Progress Corticon, a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) that delivers high-quality, high-fidelity, and high-performance automated business decisions. Corticon helps Adobe increase the agility of decision-change processes, and enables new insights into the connections between individual recurring decisions and business performance. In particular, Adobe’s sales force and product lines have benefited from predictable and accurate territory assignment and lead distribution rules and information that drive fundamental sales visibility, forecasting and compensation processes.
In fact, Adobe now leverages the entire Progress Corticon portfolio (Studio, Server and Enterprise Data Connector) to expand functionality for Adobe’s sales force automation in Salesforce.com. Progress Corticon has been critical to expanding capability in the areas of lead distribution and territory assignment. After the initial design and modeling effort, those same business rules are now maintained in Progress Corticon in near-real-time, by just one part-time rule modeler.
“The effort required to maintain the Lead Distribution and Territory Assignment logic has been greatly reduced and in addition, we are able to reprocess all of our territory assignments daily, ensuring accurate sales team coverage,” says Stuart Wong, Director Business Solutions for Adobe. Furthermore, notes Wong, “Progress Corticon enables our Sales Operations organization to react quickly to go-to- market and business process changes within the sales organization. This includes regular shifting of assignments for personnel changes, and the more complex annual go- to-market territory changes.”
Building on Success
Progress Corticon was implemented for sales territory assignment, creating virtual account teams for multiple team roles, covering all Digital Marketing product lines. This system is maintained today on an ongoing basis. “Progress Corticon was easily scalable when we had to build out the capabilities to respond to increased volume and use,” says Wong.
Adobe now runs its territory assignment through Progress Corticon Enterprise Data Connector (EDC), which connects decision services to external data sources and increases agility without the need for expensive custom coding.
For Adobe, Corticon EDC makes it possible to quickly and efficiently retrieve needed sales territory data from a database extracted from Salesforce.com, with little need for ongoing maintenance.
Based on the current results, Adobe is now looking to further standardize on Progress Corticon to address new solution requirements for business rules administration and processing. In particular, Adobe is planning to modify its lead distribution application to use Corticon EDC for querying a database that will contain much of the needed data for their decisions. Other groups within Adobe have also started to use Progress Corticon for new rule applications, including one for product subscription management.
According to Wong, Progress technical support and professional services were instrumental in ensuring the success of the initial deployment and solution configuration.
Benefits
Progress Corticon has delivered ease-of-use, allowing Adobe to easily change rules “on the fly.” Crucially, it also boasts outstanding integration capabilities; its standard SOAP web service interface allows easy integration with many platforms, including Salesforce.com, in which Adobe had already made a significant investment. Finally, notes Wong, Corticon delivered rule integrity. “Knowing rules are accurate at design time rather than later in the solution delivery lifecycle has been vitally important in our constant search to deliver value to our business partners sooner,” says Wong.