Nanda Kasabe
Pick-and-pay e-commerce will be big business. Around $2.3 trillion to be
precise by the year 2003, says Dr S Sunderrajan, Vice President (India
operations), Selectica Configurators Pvt. Ltd.
With Indian companies looking for their share in the global market pie, Dr
Sunderrajan figures that helping them go global will fuel Selectica’s growth
plans. Dr Sunderrajan plans to achieve this objective through its Internet
selling system.
"The word e-commerce as understood by the common man is synonymous with
pick and pay through credit cards. However, from the sellers’ perspective,
e-commerce has not been an unqualified success. Statistics reveal that even in
the pick-and-pay environment, Internet selling is failing to convert most
shoppers into buyers," explained Dr Sunderrajan. He believes that while the
early e-commerce success stories were about selling relatively simple products,
a larger opportunity exists in selling complex products and services over the
Internet.
Dr Sunderrajan believes that people who succeeded in acquiring and
institutionalizing knowledge are likely to be leaders in the corporate world.
Once the knowledge is acquired, a rule-based or constraint-based ‘configurator
engine’ can drive the business processes, he said. And the first killer
application for the configurator is likely to be the Internet selling systems (ISS).
And Selectica is an Internet selling systems company.
What is an online sales configurator? Dr Sunderrajan explains that this is a
software package that guides users to optimal solutions based on user input
compared with predefined product area. "A configurator can be thought of as
an ideal virtual salesperson, who is available 24 hours a day, requires no
salary and delivers the best possible product or service for every sale,"
he remarked.
At the core of the ISS lies a configurator engine. The configurator engine
interactively assists buyers through selection, configuration, quoting, pricing
and fulfillment of products or services that precisely meet their needs.
Dr Sunderrajan cited the example of shopping for a new car. Instead of
visiting a car maker’s Web site that features the different models, an
Internet selling system driven by a configurator engine is more convenient. If
your top criteria for a new car are price, number of seats, mileage, sunroof and
CD player, then all you need to do is enter i this data. From here, the
configurator asks you to make a few more required choices. With the click of a
button, the configurator displays the car models that best fit in with the needs
of the customer. The customer can then narrow this down to one final
configuration, save it and then create additional configurations for comparison.
"The Selectica ISS is based on the knowledge base that captures the
collective expertise and experience of the entire enterprise relating to
marketing, selling and servicing products using a table driven approach,"
says Dr Sunderrajan. This mainly includes product, pricing, ordering, marketing,
service and other business rules.
Selectica’s ISS is the preferred choice for some of the world’s largest
and biggest B2B and B2C sites. Take the case of Selectica’s success story with
BMW of North America. Recreating the experience on the ‘ultimate driving
machine’ on the Web was quite a challenge before the company. The company used
its Ace ISS to build a virtual center and managed to reduce what was a 15-step
process in purchasing a car to a mere three-step process. With Samsung
Electronics, Selectica faced the challenge of integrating e-commerce
applications and support for double-byte Korean characters. The result: a
configure-to-order system enabling resellers and customers to order PCs online.
Enthused by its success with global companies, Selectica is now looking at
Indian companies. "We are adopting a two pronged strategy for growth.
Besides tapping the Japanese and the Far Eastern markets, the company also plans
to offer solutions to the medium scale industry. Eventually, this will be a
packaged solution," Dr Sunderrajan said.