Trends Watch

Mobilizing Sales-force at Optimum Cost

PCQ Bureau

01 Feb 2010 06:34 IST

New Update

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.

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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.

On benefits of

Secondary Sales Solution

'Deploying this mobile application solution has not

only enabled our sales-team to record in real time the stock to be ordered,

but has also enabled them to feed-in the reasons why any particular retailer

is not availing our products. The supervisor within no time obtains these

reports and visits these retailers the very next day to resolve the issues.

This has improved our productivity by helping us identify the problem areas

immediately and resolve them swiftly and effectively. With this solution, we

now have a greater ability to monitor our sales team and supervisors.

Earlier the salespersons were working on their own design, now they are

following the foot-route specified by us.'

Vijay Parekh, Girnar Beverages and Foods

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.

Next-Enabling

Claim Surveyors to Work on the Move

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