I have been on the Cisco distribution team for more than a dozen years now and our relationship is complex. Before starting with the Cisco team, I only knew a “dart” to be something that had a flight and gets tossed at a board while we consume adult beverages. This usage of the word (which turned out to be an acronym), however, was one I had only yet to become familiar with. In short, to receive special pricing for an opportunity, a user would have to input a request into the Distribution Authorization Request Tool, which would in turn kick out a D-A-R-T. The tool was easy enough to use as there were only a handful of fields on a single screen to fill out. A reseller might never see this as I think it was a behind-the-curtain-thing and created on their behalf. The whole thing was straightforward and required little training to master. Even though it’s a legacy term referring to an old tool that has long since been retired, I still hear it regularly. No one seems to be concerned that there is a new acronym in town, they’ll just stick to DART, thank you very much. Maybe it’s just the company I keep.
Also, fresh from the showroom when I started this journey was the Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW). Cisco had just launched it and was trying to convince us it was going to be the future of transacting with them. Clearly, they weren’t completely wrong about that. Smash cut to today where it has developed into the near all-encompassing platform we know now where resellers, distributors and cisco team members alike can work collectively. It, and all the things it manages, has grown in both scope and complexity. Not surprisingly, those two things often go hand-in-hand, and when you’re talking about the transaction, complexity can cost time, which always equals money. The answer is, of course, to find a way to simplify the transaction a little to save some time and, subsequently, costs.
One way to streamline things is by using the TD SYNNEX 1Source dashboard to manage your Cisco transactions. Once the Cisco Deal has been approved, generating a valid TD SYNNEX quote is as easy and quick as clicking a button. Whether your deal contains hardware, software, services or subscriptions, 1Source can pull it in and show you your pricing. If you only have a validated CCW Estimate ID, the tool can generate a CCW Quick Quote on your behalf and move right through to displaying pricing. If you need a little assistance putting together a validated bill of materials just to get that far, there’s even a way to engage a Cisco Certified Engineer right there in the dashboard. Sending an email and waiting around to receive your quote and/or order confirmation just extends SLAs unnecessarily when you can have it all right now using the right tools.
That’s just getting you to the quote. Traditionally, transacting Cisco is not what anyone would describe as a walk in the park. Over the course of time, the amount of nuanced data embedded in every line of every deal has only grown. Not only does the bill of materials have to be valid but it needs to contain configuration lines, zero-dollar parts and something now called “Magic Keys.” I don’t think I need to tell you that there is no magic in any one of those keys—only data. And if someone misfires a digit or cuts/pastes something only ever so slightly inaccurately, the whole shooting match can be delayed. Purchase orders can’t get booked as quickly as expected, which means orders might not get shipped when expected. There goes more time.
Here again, 1Source is going to help put things together. All the data to build your quote and subsequent order are populated via API. Everything is sourced from a validated Cisco Estimate or CCW Deal ID, which means it includes all the hidden pieces of the puzzle. These are the little things you never see, but can really hold things up and more so, often seem to hold everything together. Using 1Source to create your quote and then convert to an order means we’re pulling all that minutia from the source. That all equates to less room for error, going right back to the value of your time.
The entire TD SYNNEX ECExpress website, including 1Source, is built around the concept of reseller empowerment. Providing resellers the tools they need to simplify some of the complexity that has been baked into the Cisco transaction for so long has been a guiding principle of the project team. From this single pane of glass, a user can create a quote, book an order, manage their Cisco transactions, and even get a little engineering help when they need it. With everything you need at your fingertips, your time and your SLAs can finally be your own. Less time spent on the transaction equates to less associated costs hidden within the methods and means and reduced overhead just by using the right tools.
As part of the project team, I talk to resellers every day about how and why they should use 1Source. Simplifying the transaction and reducing costs are just part of the equation. Our 1Source dashboard is just the latest in what is quickly becoming a suite of products TD SYNNEX offers resellers to manage and streamline their Cisco practice. We show users some of the features and benefits of using 1Source and a little about how navigate around inside, though we do like to think that our tool is intuitive. So much so that my working title for this piece was going to be “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 1Source,” but I figured no one would get the reference.
Learn more about 1Source by reaching out to the team directly at 1Source@tdsynnex.com.
