Adobe Increases Alignment and Agility of Global Sales Team with Corticon

As a global leader in digital marketing and digital media solutions, Adobe has helped redefine industries with innovative technologies and products. Today, Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences.

However, as Adobe’s reach has grown over the years, so too has the size, complexity and geographic distribution of Adobe’s sales organization and product lines. To maintain operational efficiency in a global market, Adobe needed to improve the accuracy of its territory assignment process and lead distribution. With its existing business rules management process, this was a significant obstacle.

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 was implemented for sales territory assignment, creating virtual account teams for multiple team roles and covering all digital marketing product lines.

Corticon empowers Adobe to increase the agility of decision-change processes, providing new insights into the connections between individual recurring decisions and business performance. In particular, Adobe’s sales team and product lines have benefited from predictable and accurate territory assignment and lead distribution rules as well as better access to information that drives fundamental sales visibility, forecasting and compensation processes.

In fact, Adobe now leverages the entire Corticon portfolio (Studio, Server and Enterprise Data Connector) to expand functionality for Adobe’s sales team automation in Salesforce. Corticon has been critical to expanding lead distribution and territory assignment capabilities, with all the different business rules maintained in Corticon in near-real-time by just one part-time rule modeler.

For Adobe, Corticon Enterprise Data Connector (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. Adobe now runs its territory assignment through Corticon EDC.

With Corticon, Adobe can separate decisions from processes to quickly create or reuse business rules as well as create, improve, collaborate on and maintain decision logic. On top of that, Corticon is extremely scalable, which enables Adobe to rapidly build out the necessary capabilities to respond to increased volume and use.

“The effort required to maintain all the business logic has been greatly reduced and we are also able to reprocess all of our territory assignments daily, ensuring accurate sales team coverage,” says Stuart Wong, Director of Business Solutions, Adobe. “Corticon enables our sales organization to react quickly to go-to-market and business process changes within the sales organization.”

Based on the current results, Adobe is now looking to further standardize on 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 its decisions. Other groups within Adobe have also started to use Corticon for new rule applications, including one for product subscription management.

“Corticon provides us with rule integrity. Knowing rules are accurate at design time rather than later in the solution delivery lifecycle has been vital in our effort to deliver value to our business partners sooner,” says Wong.