At Husqvarna Forest & Garden, Co., thinking big has been a priority for over 300 years. As a provider of a wide range of forestry, lawn, and garden products, this Sweden-based company has served a number of important clients across the globe. In addition to serving a customer base of approximately 6,000 in just the U.S. and Canada, the North American branch of Husqvarna is also the official Forest, Lawn, and Garden Equipment of NASCAR. Moreover, after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Husqvarna was there to donate both funds and equipment to the recovery efforts, including power cutters, work gloves, safety glasses, and more. With large scale projects such as these, as well as a feature-rich Web site that helps customers immediately locate dealers on the Web, Husqvarna North America required a comprehensive solution, one that would give them the technology they needed to effectively handle numerous customers and data from different systems in a variety of ways.
Husqvarna needed a tool that would enable them to create a technology solution for both internal and external personnel, as well as for their customers on the Web. More specifically, the Husqvarna team required a data management system that would improve the flow of information between numerous employees, while simultaneously enabling them to better serve the large number of requests to locate dealers on the Web. According to Darwin Caverly, Senior Analyst of Husqvarna, having accurate and up-to-date information on customers would help in-house staff and Husqvarna’s external field sales force, not to mention improve internal workflow processes across the board. "We needed to track more information on our customers than just orders and sales," explains Caverly. "We wanted to improve the information flow between our dealers, our outside people, and our inside people, while reducing the need for manually tracking certain information. We also needed to eliminate the re-keying of information into separate systems, and ideally, keep ourselves from outsourcing the dealer locator service in order to keep it as up-to-date and self-maintaining as possible." Essentially, Caverly and the entire North American Husqvarna team required a solution that could handle serving the needs of their Dealer Locator on the Web while providing the company itself with a reliable client/server network application.
Husqvarna North America chose 4D to develop its HuskyTracks application, which manages the company’s diverse technology needs such as in-house and remote users as well as its strong presence on the Web. For Caverly, the 4D environment was the most cost-effective, easy to use, and technically versatile option available for his company’s needs. "We looked at all the major sales force automation systems, and they were either too expensive, did not meet our requirements, or took a long time to integrate with existing systems and implement," notes Caverly.
The same system used to streamline Husqvarna’s internal workflow is used to handle the Web application as well. 4D Server/Client, gives 60 of Husqvarna’s in-house employees a reliable, cross-platform, relational database management system that receives data from a variety of sources such as IBM AS/400 and Windows NT. 4D Engine is used to create a stand-alone, double-clickable version of the application that is deployed to 65 remote users. 4D Open for 4D supports connectivity for these remote users, allowing them to sync with the server using 4D Developer, Flat Top Technology’s synchronization library. "The multiprocessing ability of the 4th Dimension development environment is key for our solution, since it allows us to automate and schedule various tasks that need to be done regularly," said Caverly. Since a significant part of Husqvarna’s business relies on the individual dealers who sell Husqvarna equipment, the same HuskyTracks application is used to increase business by powering the Dealer Locator search function located on the Husqvarna Web site. The Dealer Locator instantly gives consumers detailed dealer contact and location information after they enter in a zip code.
As the needs of Husqvarna North America increase, so will 4D’s abilities to accommodate these needs. With assistance from 4D Developer DataCraft, Husqvarna is developing powerful e-mail and faxing capabilities to further streamline communication processes and improve information flow within the company. "We will continue to use 4D to develop more unique features that make our business processes more efficient," notes Caverly. "Integrated e-mail with spell checking will allow anyone to easily send an e-mail to one or all of our customers. An improved faxing system that is near completion will allow remote field sales people to fax all of his or her customers, with the ability to prepare the actual fax offline and attach any kind of document to the fax." The scalability of the 4th Dimension development environment offers Caverly an ideal place to accomplish these and any other future goals with ease and efficiency.
» Darwin Caverly
Senior Analyst
Husqvarna Forest & Garden
704.921.6858
Parc Empresarial del Mediterrani
Passeig del Ferrocarril,
339,
Bxs,
3a 08860
Castelldefels (Barcelona)
Tel : 93 665 76 72
Fax: 93 645 50 89
