Driving a Billion-Dollar Business with a Collaborative Platform Based on HCL Domino

More than 900 employees across A1 now rely on the company’s Domino application to coordinate their sales activities.

“Whether it’s our pre-sales teams calculating on costings and working on tenders, our post-sales teams helping to fulfill orders, or our managers overseeing the entire process, Domino is at the heart of practically everything our people do,” says Schaller.

“Whereas in the past our sales teams would have to spend large amounts of time each week building sales reports, our managers can now generate them in the application with the click of a button. As a result, we’ve unlocked enormous operational efficiencies — freeing our sales teams to focus on building relationships with prospects. Most importantly, our sellers now have a centralized platform to collaborate on opportunities, which means we can bring together talent from across the organization to help close deals.”

As part of an international group with operations throughout Europe and in Mexico, A1 must meet regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which mandates financial disclosures from corporations to prevent accounting fraud. Using Domino, A1 was able to quickly and effectively roll out changes to its business logic to help ensure compliance with the new regulations.

Schaller comments: “For example, if our sales pipeline application detects that an employee has exported more than 50 lines of data to a spreadsheet, it automatically alerts their manager to investigate further and confirm there is a legitimate reason for the activity. The regulatory environment is always changing, and we need to be agile to meet emerging requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR]. Thanks to Domino, we can make the necessary updates to our application without any downtime — enabling us to meet our regulatory obligations with no interruption to the business.”

The majority of A1’s sales representatives use iPads while they work remotely with prospects. Looking ahead, A1 plans to utilize mobile support in Domino 10 and 11 to enable its teams to access their applications securely from their tablets.

"The secure mobile support in Domino 10/11 has changed the way we do business,” says Schaller. “Our teams are able to access databases and systems from anywhere at all times, bringing our whole organization closer to digital transformation."

A1 has trusted Domino to drive its business for more than 15 years and is confident that the solution has delivered a significant return on investment. Despite supporting a range of complex use cases, the solution requires a team of just three full-time equivalents (FTEs) to manage and develop — including all training and helpdesk-related tasks. 

“We have upgraded our Domino platform a number of times over the years,” concludes Schaller. “Every piece of information we put into our sales pipeline management application on day one is still accessible — whether it is stored in our production applications or in archive applications, which also run on Domino. Without a doubt, Domino is unbeatable when it comes to total cost of ownership, especially compared to enterprise-class ERP applications that perform similar functions. Just like a decathlete needs to perform at a high level in a variety of disciplines, Domino has proven it has the versatility and agility we need to drive our billion-dollar business.”