JEOL USA
JEOL is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of Electron Microscopes and other types of analytical instruments, including Mass Spectrometers, NMRs, ESRs, and Semiconductor Equipment. They sell many of these products on a made to order basis through a direct sales force to both public and private sector research facilities and semiconductor manufacturing facilities. JEOL’s products are characterized by:

1. A high level of complexity and variability with long supply chain lead times for key components
2. A high degree of customization by customer

The Business Benefit
CodeLab developed a system that provides sales agents and customers with critical, real-time information at the point of sale. The result is a rules-based quotation system that interfaces with JEOL’s Glovia-based production and scheduling software to provide sales agents with remote, wireless access. Users can enter, save, and modify multiple quotes. This allows agents to provide customers with instant feedback to their inevitable requests to modify product configurations while providing them with the best possible instrument for their limited budget and delivery deadlines. By interfacing with JEOL’s ERP package, the system:

1. Provides dynamic, accurate pricing and delivery based on availability of components in the supply chain.
2. Can accommodate user entered changes in delivery date to re-price the product based on rush charges and costs associated with interruption of the production line.
3. Eliminates manual entry errors made when transferring order information into production.

The Technical Challenge
During the sales process many customers request multiple product configurations to optimize constraints like budget and delivery date with the product’s configuration. It is critical for sales agents to have the ability to quickly and accurately recalculate the price and delivery date to reflect multiple product configurations. At the same time, the system must ensure that these product configurations are kept compliant with the set of engineering rules required for the instrument – a task made all the more complex by the variety of requests that their customers sometimes make.

Managing the burgeoning list of product permutations, while also understanding customer preferences and ordering patterns is also important to JEOL, but was difficult to do prior to the implementation of our custom solution.

“CodeLab was able to understand our requirements – which were quite complex – and build a system that not only reflected our initial requirements, but that has also proven capable of supporting our evolving needs.”

Pat McGinley VP, JEOL, USA