"Did You Say Champagne or Champale?"

Southern Wine & Spirits is America's largest adult beveragedistributor, controlling about 13 percent of the market. TheMiami-based company has 40,000 customers, including restaurants, bars,hotels and liquor stores, and stocks 25,000 different products inCalifornia alone. "There's not enough paper in the world for a salesforce to track all the items and vintages," says Vice President ofSales and Marketing Steven Burrows. Yet, before the wireless system,that's what they had to do. Reps would keep stacks of books in thetrunk of their car so that they could have descriptions of the variousbrands and vintages handy.

Furthermore, there was no easy way of tracking inventory or suddenprice spikes, which are common in an industry where the weather playsa large role in determining both quantity and quality of thegrapes.

If sales reps had improved access to inventory and price data, as wellas each customer's order history, they would be more productive,Burrows believed. Based in San Francisco and responsible forSouthern's Web presence (though not corporate IT), he thought thatwireless devices with access to the corporate systems could do thejob.

The reps thought so too. Most reported wasting several hours a dayresearching vintages, checking voice mail for order status, andcalling the main office for inventory and price updates. They allthought that wireless devices would help them close deals and improvecustomer service.