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Selectica to help Indian companies make it big in e-commerce

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CIOL Bureau
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Nanda Kasabe

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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.

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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.

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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.

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