BT Rolatruc is one of the UK's leading suppliers of material handling equipment, with over 700 staff operating from seven regional centres they offer a complete range of warehouse and counter balance trucks and associated services. The company is part of the Swedish BT Industries group, which has manufacturing plants in Sweden and the US, with a world wide distribution network, including twelve European sales companies. The BT group recently joined forces with Toyota to form the world's largest industrial truck company. BT Rolatruc prides itself on its reputation for complete customer solutions. Many of it's customers are in retail and distribution and include Safeway, Sainsbury, MFI, Tibbet and Britten, Wincanton and Hays Logistics. The majority of equipment supplied by BT Rolatruc is based upon the Company¹s "Genuine Long-term Rental" plans. Differing from other rental/lease plans, Genuine Long-term Rental from BT does not involve the customer having to arrange finance through a bank or similar finance company.

We started by creating a series of some 30 different look-up tables which are used to hold details of all of the rates for every situation. A laptop application was then developed based around a Visual Basic client and a SQL Server Desktop Engine. This application includes a single screen for entering and calculating costs and a slider bar allowing the salesman to adjust the level of discount given. This causes the end result to be recalculated based upon values taken from the 30 look-up tables. The laptop application is completely stand-alone and is normally operated without any external connection. However, details of the calculations have to be sent back to base.

Updates to the base lookup tables also need to be sent to the salesman. These are both achieved using bi-directional SQL Server merge replication. Every day or so the salesmen dial in and press a button on the Sales Calculator to synchronise the data between their laptop and the central SQL Server database. Under some circumstances, such as a level of discount greater than the salesman's authority level or a particularly severe set of environmental conditions, the figures may need to be referred back to the office. This is again achieved via the synchronisation mechanism. At the same time an e-mail is automatically sent warning the relevant person (for example the salesman's boss or the Service Manager) that a calculation needs their intervention and asking them to check the figures on the central database, agree or modify them and then to authorise or reject the calculation. The new figures are then transmitted back to the salesman on the next synchronisation.
However not everyone checks their e-mails regularly so, using a belt-and-braces approach, the system also automatically sends an SMS text message to the same person's mobile phone.

A central application is used to set-up new users, maintain the lookup tables, print off contracts and so on. The system has 65 salesmen and 20 office based users and went live in Jan 2002.