On of Latin America's largest snack food and tortilla manufacturing companies, Gruma (manufacturers of Mission Tortillas in the United States), wanted more visibility and control of the retail sales process. They mandated their major distributors in Costa Rica implement a business intelligence and mobile sales force automation solution.
Two of their largest distributors in San Jose, Costa Rica's capital and a major metropolitan area, stepped up to the plate and led the way for the company's 8 distributors nationwide.
Gruma's largest distributor, Joma S.A., for example, was making daily deliveries to 5,000 grocery stores, supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, convenience stores, restaurants and fast food places such as Burger King and Taco Bell, through a network of 40 route drivers. Each one of the route drivers was an independently owned micro-business that delivered food in different areas of the city or in the surrounding areas.
Gruma's distributors had about a 90% market share in Costa Rica, but smaller suppliers were keeping them from growing, and some were making inroads into their market. Additionally, in order to keep growing profit margins had to improve, and management at these companies had run out of creative ways to improve profitability.
Respond to Customer Needs and Gather Data with Mobile Technology
Joma S.A., and fellow San Jose distributor Oro Blanco, realized the only way to increase sales and profitability, as well as to provide the information Gruma needed, was to have tighter control over the relationship with their own customers (the stores and restaurants) via the use of technology.
This required daily information at the point of sale such as returns, sales, performance of individual brands, promotional displays, stores and route drivers, and it also required on the spot invoicing, increasing cash-flow due to faster collections, and freeing up resources at company headquarters.
The companies did an extensive search for the right company to implement this solution and found IE Soft. Due to IE Soft's knowledge of the food industry, it's traceability experience, flexibility, SOA and agile expperience, they were the ideal technology partner.
IE Soft built a mobile sales force system that enabled the companies to issue their route-drivers iPaq 256 pocket computers along with Zebra MZ 320 mobile printing devices. This system allowed route drivers to:
· Check which list of clients to visit that day, instead of manually printing out a list.
· Record inventory at clients' location as well as expired product for returns, allowing management to make strategic decisions on product placement on a store-by-store basis.
· Generate invoices on-the-spot, eliminating the need for headquarters personnel to create and send invoices.
· Summary of sales, returns, visits, and performance vs. quota, providing route drivers essential information on job performance.
Management Dashboards to Improve Management Insight into the Business
Route drivers returned to the warehouse by 2pm, at which time all the data such as invoices issued, products returned, customers visited and other important data points was synchronized with the companies' management systems and immediately fed into a management dashboard for use by company executives.
The dashboards gave executives at the distribution companies a daily snapshot of their business, starting at 3pm, 1 hour after the last route driver returned.
Managers were able to:
1. Set objectives.
The system allowed management to set yearly, monthly and daily goals and measure daily monthly and yearly performance against these goals.
2. Analyze sales performance.
The management dashboards gave the companies insights into as many details as possible regarding performance, such as sales per route driver, sales per brand, sales per customer, performance of particular promotions or point-of-purchase displays, and performance vs. the competition.
3. Data across the supply chain
The systems build by IE Soft allowed the distributors to see exactly what was going on at the point-of-purchase: what stores, restaurants, or snack bars received less frequent visits, which ones only ordered one item, performance of point-of-purchase displays, and performance vis-a-vis the competition.
The insights gained allowed managers to increase control over aspects of their business they previously had no control over, by allowing them to make daily decisions such as what customers individual route drivers needed to visit more frequently, how to increase sales of different brands, and how to improve point-of-purchase promotions.
Additionally, they were able to share this data with Gruma, enabling them to utilize the data for further product development and product marketing.
The system was eventually implemented at all 8 of Gruma's distributors in Costa Rica.
"Quiero externarte que su aporte es muy valioso al desarrollar una herramienta como el sistema MOVIL DE VENTAS que ha logrado impulsar a nuestra empresa a niveles de excelencia que nos permiten contar con información muy valiosa del mercado para la toma de decisiones.M.B.A. José Rodríguez Castro
Presidente JOMASA & MAJOLI S.A.
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