Mobilizing Sales-force at Optimum Cost

Girnar Beverages & Foods is a known name in the tea and coffee manufacturing
and exporting industry which has its head-office based in Mumbai. The company
has a secondary sales team that operates in various locations in and around the
city. Tracking the activities of the sales team on a daily basis was a major
problem for the company. The company soon realized the importance to automate
their sales-force with a solution that can track the daily sales team
productivity. Automating the sales-force would also mean that a sales-personnel
would not have to travel to office for daily reporting thus saving on travel
time and costs. For doing so the company deployed Secondary Sales Solution from AccelTree.

The Implemented solution

Generally an enterprise project for mobilizing workforce incorporates
equipping the involved personnel with laptops with wireless connectivity or
expensive smartphones like Blackberry devices. Girnar Beverages mobilized their
sales team at a very optimum cost by using low-cost Java-enabled mobile phones,
mostly Nokia 6030. The sales personnel of Girnar use phone to collect the stock
to be ordered by their retailers through the J2ME application and upload that
data to the central servers through GPRS connectivity. The J2ME application for
the mobile devices and the server side application is developed by AccelTree.
This system supports the distribution hierarchy of salesman, route and dealer
and allows capture of sales orders in real-time. It allows promotion of various
sales schemes.

The mobile interface allows the salesperson to view his day's itinerary when
he logs into the system through his mobile application, instead of traveling to
office for knowing his route details. It gives him the lists of dealers that he
needs to visit on that day so that he can ensure that he has visited all of them
and not missed out any. The salesperson then uses the mobile application to
record the stock to be ordered from the dealers. Thus saving him time & travel
to record the data on paper and consolidate reports by travelling back to office
at the end of day. The Web interface allows him to map routes and dealers to the
salespersons, so that only the relevant routes are visible on the users phone.

Benefits

Apart from saving on paper work and reducing lead times of capturing an
order, Girnar Beverages is able to have all the secondary sales figures on
real-time basis which allows the decision-makers to track the sales
productivity, scheme efficacy and sales improvement. Whereas salespersons save
on traveling long distances to commute to office after following up with
dealers, as manual stock updating has been replaced by mobile data entry. Girnar
has been able to gain 5% in sales and productivity post implementation of this
solution.

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