Mobil Corporation's (now Exxon-Mobil) Marine Lubricants Sales Division wanted to streamline the business process for approval of sales contracts negotiated by their sales staff with customers. The existing system was tedious and cumbersome, and took a long time to get sales approvals from managers and management.

Datalink Systems Inc. analyzed the existing methods and business processes and suggested an IT based solution to reduce time from proposal to approval. Also, we deigned an application that assisted the sales staff to calculate the critical parameters that helped and guided them to close a deal or offer solutions that would help close a sale.

We developed the application in two distinct modules. One module consisted of a calculation engine that stored critical parametric values that would be used for generating reports and calculation work sheets subsequently. The other module stored products and prices at various ports worldwide.

The calculation engine, once designed, required very few modifications. However, the pricing module required frequent monthly data updates. A sophisticated system was developed to keep track of calculation engine versions and data versions so that contract parameters were correctly linked.

With the use of this application, a sales person could accurately calculate the economics of a sales contract, and under some conditions sales staff could now close a sale without referring to the sales management for approval.

The robustness of this application, and the sophistication in design and execution gave Mobil an efficient system of storing sales data for various contracts. This also helped them increase their market share with faster turn-around in closing sales.