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Color Line Goes Live on Oracle(R) E-Business SuiteOracle Marketing Online and Business Intelligence Tools Are Helping Norway's Largest Ferry Operator Create a Simplified Company-Wide Marketing ProcessREDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Oct. 30 / -- ( http://www.oracle.com/tellmemore/?1061724 ) Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL - news), the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced that Color Line, the largest ferry operator in Norway, has gone live on Oracle Marketing Online, one of the customer relationship management (CRM) modules of the Oracle E-Business Suite.Around 100 sales and marketing staff in eight Color Line offices across four different countries are now able to access the results of, and knowledge gained from, each of the company's marketing campaigns. Oracle Marketing Online will also enable Color Line to create new benchmarks to measure campaign effectiveness and devise more closely targeted marketing initiatives. The new system is the result of a long search for a suitable marketing package to help the company attract long-term customers to its fleet of nine ships running five routes between Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. During 2000, Color Line evaluated many applications, and found that only Oracle's vision for successful e-business aligned perfectly with Color Line's own. Color Line is one of the new breed of customer that Oracle is helping to simplify their business processes and information technology (IT) systems, and who recognize that customized solutions are costly and inefficient. ``We were looking for a standard software package,'' explained Anders Langaas, assistant director of E-Business for Color Line. ``We had used our own software previously, but we did not want to continue with a bespoke application. With bespoke applications, when things change, you have to spend a lot of time upgrading and getting new functionality. We wanted to have the best possible solution we could get with a standard packaged application. That's why we chose Oracle.'' Color Line also felt that using a standard, uncustomized marketing application would enable it to rethink how its marketing structure was organized. ``We have grown through acquisition, so we inherited lots of different organizational cultures,'' continued Langaas. ``But our marketing goals are simple and they span the whole company, so we needed to co-ordinate our activities across our whole marketing operation. We chose Oracle because it would also help us change the way we were organized. Instead of changing the system, we wanted to change the way we were working.'' In addition to the Oracle Marketing software, Color Line has implemented a customer data warehouse using Oracle Warehouse Builder, and is using Oracle9i Application Server's built-in querying and reporting tool, Oracle9iAS Discoverer, to analyze the information in it. The data warehouse includes booking information from legacy systems, ship capacity data, information on external services such as hotels, resorts and tourist attractions, as well as customer and campaign information from the Oracle Marketing Online application. Today, Color Line marketing staff can input details of marketing campaigns into Oracle Marketing Online. Using Oracle9iAS Discoverer to query the data warehouse, employees can immediately see which campaigns result in increased bookings. ``Now, we are identifying which marketing activities are better than others, and learning which campaigns are good and which are bad,'' explained Langaas. ``The users are really motivated because they can see and evaluate results straightaway.'' The long term benefits of the Oracle system will be the ability to measure customer loyalty and profitability, create highly targeted marketing campaigns, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns according to complex criteria. The company is already starting to enjoy the 360-degree view of the customer afforded by the single customer database. ``We did not have such a good overview before,'' said Langaas. ``We are building Oracle Marketing Online into a knowledge bank that is available to everybody, because of the browser-based access. That is another reason why we chose the Oracle software. We will also publish that knowledge bank to our intranet, using Oracle iDesk, a product built by Oracle Consulting Services Norway that we also use for Internet publishing.'' Finally, the Oracle system is giving Color Line a good insight into its internal business processes. ``We are researching the whole customer process, how our people do their work, and how we get our campaigns out to the market,'' said Langaas. ``From that research we will change our business and develop a standard marketing process.'' Color Line has now started to all of its two years of historical sales and customer data into the Oracle data warehouse, and plans to use additional Oracle business intelligence tools, Oracle Sales Analyser and Oracle Express, to analyze this data and identify long-term patterns and trends. About Oracle Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle9i is a trademark or registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. OracleMobile 415/401-4000 jmorgan@tenthdimension.com top of page |
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