Keep your workers in touch
By Julia Talevski | smh.com.au | 04 August
Competing against the might of the world's largest cosmetics company isn't easy when you're a medium-sized distributor in Australia.
However, as the Melbourne-based Heat Group has found, using the right technology goes a long way.
The Heat Group supplies cosmetic products such as Max Factor, CoverGirl, Bourjois, Elite, Red Earth and Ulta 3 to more than 1000 pharmacy outlets and major retailers including Target, Kmart, Myer, Big W, Coles, Woolworths and Priceline.
The cosmetics distributor has about 100 employees, including field staff. Ensuring the field staff have the most up-to-date product and sales information on hand proved to be the biggest challenge for the Heat Group's sales director, John Simcocks.
"We've been around for about nine years and in that time we've grown significantly," Simcocks says. "If we want to stay ahead of our major competitors like L'Oreal, we have to be smarter in the way that we do things."
After looking at and testing a number of systems, Simcocks chose to implement a mobile sales force automation solution by O4 Corporation.
The O4 software works on a personal digital assistant (PDA) device, which enables electronic access to information when it's needed by sales staff. Simcocks says the new software system provides them with the ability to manage hundreds of individual product orders a month.
Previously, capturing and recording this sort of consumer information proved to be a long and arduous task, often requiring marketing and promotional CDs to be posted to sales teams each month.
"Technology like this helps us give information to our field force. It brings us up to speed with some of the major players," Simcocks says.
The software allows retail distributors and product vendors to ensure product availability and helps them to build up their sales and retail performance. Field staff will have the capability to automate their processes rather than manually counting stock, writing it down and faxing it back to head office.
"It's provided us with significant time saving," Simcocks says. "It also enables us to take orders from our pharmacy customers and take it back to head office, where they can process it, and within 48 hours deliver the order to the pharmacy."
The distributor outgrew its previous system and didn't have the capability to download the sort of information it needed. But now with the O4 software and PDA system in place, it can cut down paper usage and provide all the latest information to its field force so they know what is happening when they visit stores.
"Being in the cosmetics industry, we have information like sales presenters, our latest TV advertising [and] information about particular types of cosmetics that people want to see in store and the technology within O4 enables us to download that quickly on to PDAs," Simcocks says.
"It also enables us to give them sales history and budgets, which they weren't able to see as readily in the previous system." It took about three months for the distributor to side with O4, he says. It had also looked at a number of other systems before making a decision.
"It wasn't an off-the-shelf product. They listened to us for a number of weeks, along with state and financial staff from across the business, and we got them to list issues and what they want to potentially look for in a new solution," he says.
Chocolate giant Cadbury has rolled out a similar solution, using O4 for its 200 territory managers. It will enable them to manage sales more efficiently, along with taking orders and new-product launches.
All the while, it will give their office-based staff access to real-time data. On average, the company can release about 30 to 50 new products a year and, at any time, territory managers could be co-ordinating about 300 products along with in-store promotions.
With O4, Cadbury can also electronically monitor in-store compliance with promotional activity, saving hours in administration time. In turn, this increased visibility will allow management to closely monitor how the field sales force and retail partners are performing.
"It's real-time data and it's the immediacy of information," says Cadbury's national sales manager, Eddie Anastasi. Previously, Cadbury had an outdated system whereby extracting information required a great deal of work, Anastasi says. Implementation of the project took about six months.
"This has brought us into the 21st century," Anastasi says.
First published by Smh.com.au on August 04 2009
Visit smh.com.au for the latest news updated throughout the day
