PC company Lenovo increased revenue by more than 100 percent and grew profits 225 percent by utilising JDA Software’s cloud services
By Anna Game-Lopata |
May 14, 2013
PC company Lenovo increased revenue by more than 100 percent and grew profits 225 percent by utilising JDA Software’s cloud services.
A US$21 billion personal technology organisation — and the second largest PC company in the world Lenovo serves customers in more than 160 countries.
Formed when it acquired the former IBM Personal Computing (PC) Division in 2005, the Lenovo Group develops, manufactures and markets “reliable, high quality, secure and easy-to-use technology products and services”.
The company says it is dedicated to building exceptionally engineered PCs and mobile Internet devices, so product innovation is a major business priority as is a highly efficient global supply chain and strong strategic execution.
While the IBM acquisition set the stage for rapid growth, it also brought with it a legacy infrastructure with limited e-commerce capabilities.
“Lenovo’s global presence expanded dramatically when it acquired IBM’s PC division,” says Vice President and General Manager Global eCommerce Ajit Sivadasan.
“The company’s revenue has since increased from US$13 billion in 2006 to US$21 billion in 2011.
“We needed a solution that could support e-commerce initiatives for the company’s new global customer base, which spans six continents, and would also enable us to continue to scale as required.”
Sivadasan adds Lenovo wanted to create an extremely configured order process that would extend all the way from the customer to the back end.
“It’s a very complex process, and few people know how to make it work,” he says.
“You need to have in-depth knowledge about the end-to end value chain and be able to drive value. We were searching for a compatible partner who could help us solve these problems.”
After an initial pilot of JDA Software’s Web commerce solution on the JDA Agile Business Process Platform (ABPP), Lenovo quickly determined that this was the right partner.
JDA Web Commerce enhances the online buying process for Lenovo’s configurable technology products, enabling the company to make more reliable and profitable order promises to its customers.
The solution also features advanced pricing structures such as volume based and special customer discounts, promotions and other assorted pricing adjustments.
Because of its limited US data centre capacity at the time of implementation, Lenovo decided to deploy JDA’s Web commerce solution and platform using JDA’s Private Cloud.
Today, JDA manages all the hardware, software and technology infrastructure behind Lenovo’s JDA Web Commerce and ABPP applications.
Through JDA Cloud Services, Lenovo says it has achieved faster deployment, rapid time to value, investment protection and an improved cost structure.
The company has also reduced its infrastructure costs by 40 percent on an annual basis.
“In the past four to five years, we’ve been trying to simplify our back end,” Sivadasan explains.
“It’s been a massive undertaking, but with JDA’s help, we’ve been able to transform most of the work and get it onto the state-of-the-art platform we want.”
Today, lenovo.com is hosted from a JDA data centre in the United States.
“The website is on the JDA platform in 70 countries, and we currently sell to end-customers via lenovo.com in seven countries,” Sivadasan says.
“JDA manages these processes for us.”
Read the full story in the SupplyChain Review’s special June issue Technology Directory.