Employing some 270,000 staff worldwide, food and beverage giant Nestlé sells a wide variety of grocery products through its own salesforce and partnering distributors' sales teams. With such extensive operations, timely and accurate market intelligence is crucial for the company.However, Nestlé faced a significant challenge in minimising wasted data entry time and associated errors, with activities such as market surveys and asset tracking done by pen and paper. Manual data entry processes also often lacked checking procedures, affecting the accuracy of secondary sales data. To add to Nestlé's woes, sales staff on customers' sites often did not have crucial information on hand to immediately respond to basic queries including stock availability, product information, order status or latest pricing.According to Patrick Goh, Nestlé Malaysia's sales project manager, sales staff members are expected to conduct activities including market surveys and asset tracking when visiting customers (retailers) to gather market intelligence. "We needed a sales navigation tool to sell the right product range at the right outlet, in the right channel and with the right promotional activity," says Goh.
Automation project
In response, Nestlé Malaysia kicked off a Salesforce Automation project (SFA) that has since been extended to operations in other branches worldwide. "We chose NewsPage as the provider of the mobile SFA solution, which runs on Motorola's PPT 8800, 8866 and MC50 series of handheld devices," he says. The project won it an MIS Asia IT Excellence Award for 2007.To facilitate deployment and bolster sales teams' confidence in using the new system, Nestlé Malaysia formed a change management team comprising trainers from NewsPage as well as selected sales and IT personnel. "Besides demonstrations, sales staff were allowed to explore the new equipment, and pair up with a trainer for hands-on training," Goh says. Next, Nestlé prepared a well-defined timetable for the system to be rolled out distributor by distributor. Following successful deployment, a secondary sales data dashboard was set up to track sales data from each handheld terminal (HHT) device. "Each HHT device captures data such as the number of outlets visited by sales staff, the number of outlets with sales, and how often the device is used," Goh says.
Adoption a pre-requisite
Nestlé has issued the devices to more than 71 distributors and 600 field forces in Malaysia and Singapore. Adoption of SFA is also a pre-requisite for becoming a Nestlé distributor in Malaysia.Nestlé's SFA leverages on NewsPage mobility framework (NPMF) technology, that as NewsPage claims, separates the operating system technology platform from business logic. "NPMF is a tool for rapid development of end-to-end mobility applications," says Goh. "It frees us from upgrading worries and provides compatibility assurance with the latest mobile operating platform." According to NewsPage, the mobile application source files are coded in XML and may be compiled to various operating systems without having to rebuild the entire application.Goh notes that the SFA provides customers and partners up-to-date sales information and product availability, reducing costs associated with inventory through a "more efficient just-in-time supply chain model".At the start of each working day, data is synchronised and downloaded into the HHT device to give Nestlé's sales teams access to up-to-date information wherever they are.Each device also has barcode scanning capability, minimising manual errors while quickly capturing customer information and product details. Additionally, receipts may be printed immediately through mobile terminal printers and Bluetooth technology, according to Goh.
Measuring performance
Goh states that Nestlé Malaysia does not have quantifiable performance data such as increased revenues or lower costs resulting from the SFA deployment. "Because we work through 68 distributors in Malaysia that deploy SFA and cover almost 100,000 customers, I don't think internal ROI [return on investment] is an appropriate indicator of SFA performance."However, he cited several benefits from deployment. "With necessary information now available on-hand, sales teams can better respond to customers' queries, leading to greater customer satisfaction."The barcode scanning capability of HHT devices also ensures sales personnel make physical calls to outlets according to schedule, raising service quality.Additionally, Nestlé distributors in different markets can quickly and easily customise applications within the SFA system according to their customers' and business requirements.By automating data entry, sales staff can more accurately gather market intelligence. "Tight integration with back-end processes was critical and vendors helped us to deploy this successfully, end to end," Goh says. "The new system has also boosted morale and effectiveness of sales teams."
