Mumbai, India - Sun Pharmaceuticals broke the convention of using PDAs for sales force automation solutions. The Sales force of Sun Pharmaceuticals now using mobile phones for their Sales force automation needs. Mobile SFA now provides Sun’s Sales Force a powerful tool to communicate with each other to share market information, with the advantage of a homogeneous Sales Policy being followed by them and at a fraction of the cost. Base Information, a pioneer in Mobile computing solutions provided Sun Pharmaceuticals with the M-SFA.

Sun saw many benefits from Mobile Based Applications M-SFA

• M-SFA is an add-on to the main ERP, it dovetails almost seamlessly.
• M-SFA is a powerful tool in the hands of a Sales-person, hastening the Customers decision making process while placing orders.
• M-SFA works out to be very cost effective and efficient as compared to Web access.
• The Marketing Team / Sales Force do not have to go and stand in Queue of a Cyber-café at 10 in the night to send their call reports!

There was an initial resistance by the Corporates to provide the Phone, for paid activity reporting on the M-SFA platform. The Economics and Utility of the solution dawned, no sooner they stopped looking at it as another M-FSA solution. With the advent of the Smart phone, coupled with an expected reduction in their prices, we imagine even more organizations to adopt a unified Communication/Reporting device like it by the year 2004-2005.

Quoting Mr. Nilay Sharma, Director, Base Information Management where he points out that “Since the western countries were first in the mobile arena, and were hamstrung by their relatively older technology. Consequently they were unable to reap benefits of the latest offerings. They still have to rely on PDA-Cradle-Synch option. Mobile telephony provides with an opportunity tap on the technology and availability of the Smart Phone”

“Base has the capacity to conceive applications on the Palm OS, Windows CE platform as well as on the Mobile phone/Smart phone. The Java-GPRS architecture of Base M-SFA provides a plethora of options and customizations to its users.” says Mr. Kardarpa Baghar, Director, Base Information Management. Base has been developing mobile based applications from the year 2001.

At that point of time programmable phones were prohibitively priced or simply unavailable. The gap between the features of the PDA and the Mobile/Smart phone does not exist any longer.