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By Clinton Wilder Primus Telecommunications Group Inc. is out to prove that service vendors can use Internet technology to enhance their sales and business processes as effectively as product sellers do. Primus, a $320 million business and residential long-distance phone company, recently went live with an intranet application that shortens the time it takes to get new U.S. customers up and running after they place orders. The company says its Primus Order Entry Management System (Poems) has already shaved several days off what is normally a two-week cycle time for provisioning-the telecom industry's term for activating a new customer's service. The system is based on the OrderManager 3.0 Web order-processing application from SpaceWorks Inc. Poems runs on a Windows NT server and links via OrderManager gateways to Primus' two most important back-office provisioning applications: EDS's IXplus customer-billing program, and a TRW credit database for automatic customer-credit verification. Poems also sends a batch customer-information file to the new customer's local exchange carrier to further facilitate service activation. "In our business, every day counts," says Yousef Javadi, president and chief operating officer of Primus' North American business. "Everyone is looking to innovate-to do things better, faster, and easier. We felt that the way of the future was to have a Web-based system." Primus considered using a client-server sales-force-automation application to replace its former paper-based order-entry system. But it decided that an intranet would be more cost-effective and, just as important, more scalable. About 50 Primus internal sales reps in the United States now process their orders with Poems, but the company is considering rolling it out to several hundred internal and third-party sales agents in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. Last week, Primus expanded into the Latin American and Caribbean markets by completing a $150 million acquisition of international long-distance carrier TresCom International Inc. Primus is SpaceWorks' first service-industry customer for OrderManager, which sells for about $250,000. "We've focused on packaged or hard goods up to now, but the Internet technology model makes sense for services providers," says Liz Sara, VP of marketing at SpaceWorks. "They still have a catalog of offerings and still need an easy way for individual units of service to be ordered, searched, and tracked." At some point, Primus plans to make the leap from intranet order-processing automation to selling long-distance service-and products such as prepaid phone cards-on the Web. Says Javadi: "More and more of our customers around the world are keen to use the Internet to access us."
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