Amazon India Prevents IT Burnout and Collects Business-Critical Information with the Help of FormAssembly
Case Study Snapshot
The Form Advocate
Abhinav Singh Kakran, Manager of Program Management
FormAssembly is ideal for large companies because of its ability to provide a flexible, easy-to-implement solution to common business process problems. Learn how Amazon India was able to use FormAssembly in this way to collect information from outside vendors and connect it seamlessly to their internal systems. The solution allowed Amazon India to avoid overtaxing their IT team and easily collect business-critical information.
According to Amazon India’s Manager of Program Management Abhinav Singh Kakran, they learned about FormAssembly through the U.S. Amazon team and evaluated other tools before completely settling on FormAssembly. The FormAssembly-Salesforce connection and ability to transfer data into their Salesforce org was a key reason Amazon chose FormAssembly.
About Amazon India
Amazon is one of the most recognizable online retailers in the world today, with offices located in more than 30 countries. The retailer offers a vast variety of products, goods, and services that are sold and shipped either directly from Amazon or from independent third-party sellers. Amazon India is a global branch of the company, providing direct access to similar goods and services, with specialized feature products tailored to customers in India.
The Numbers
active web forms in use
sellers in the Amazon India Seller Program
%
growth in revenue in 2017 fiscal year
The Problem:
A Disconnected Vendor System
Amazon India’s sales structure is such that they have partnerships with vendors that help to onboard sellers, but have no access to Amazon systems. Amazon India needed to find a way to collect this seller information, so they could track progress toward goals, and pay vendors correctly.
“FormAssembly was quite easy for us. It was a very basic plug-and-play kind of set-up. We did evaluate two other form creation tools, but they were not exactly meeting our needs at that particular time,” Kakran said. “Our use case might not be that big an issue for the U.S. team, but it’s quite big for us, because we have vendors that work outside of the Amazon network, and FormAssembly became the only way to connect their information to our internal CRM that is Salesforce. And that’s how we got started using this tool.”
Use Case
Connecting Vendors and Amazon Via Web Forms
“In India, the seller ecosystem is very fragmented. We have partnership models with a lot of vendors who essentially are not Amazon employees, not even contractors, and they don’t have any kind of access to Amazon systems. If we have to track their progress, if we have to pay them in terms of what they achieved in terms of seller launches, we need their data and we need the real-time data flow,” Kakran said.
The resulting solution was a FormAssembly form where seller information input and then transferred into their Salesforce CRM.
“We knew where each of our vendors are, how many sellers we have launched, how much of the pipeline we’d achieved and that kind of thing,” Kakran said.
The Result:
A Flexible, Customizable Solution
Amazon benefitted from FormAssembly’s ease-of-use, many features, and customizable security.
Ease of Use
“FormAssembly is a very high-utility tool for us because it’s plug-and-play. It would take us a significant amount of dev effort to build internally in Amazon, and we’d also spend a good amount of bandwidth maintaining that tool. With FormAssembly, you can just log in to Salesforce and create whatever forms you need.”
Many Features
“FormAssembly comes with a lot of bundled offerings and you can do a lot of things with it. You can connect many forms, you can hide the information, you can add in custom code. If FormAssembly was not there, it would make big impact for our teams who are helping us build this marketplace in India.”
Customizable Security
“At any given time, we can control how many days we want Amazon data to reside on external third-party servers. FormAssembly’s security features are very handy, especially when you’re dealing with confidential data about customers and sales.”
What’s Next?
“FormAssembly has spread across Amazon India especially on the seller-facing teams and I think we have around 10 to 12 active forms on FormAssembly,” Kakran said.
Kakran said dealing with vendors outside of the Amazon network is a daily occurrence for him, and the information that FormAssembly allows them to collect on those vendors is key to accomplishing goals and maintaining productivity.
“Functionality wise, I’m really pleased with FormAssembly,” Kakran said.
