SOUTH AFRICA – DGB, one of South Africa’s largest independent wine and spirit producers and distributors, has adopted the use of clouds solutions to streamline operations and bolster sales.
The cellar owner chose the SAP Sales Cloud Retail Execution (ReX) solution and worked with implementation partner Consnet to design and introduce the technology into the business.
Pieter Steyn, Commercial Manager at DGB highlights that the system was essential to integrate all business functions and processes in real time to help manage the large team of salespeople effectively, reports Africa Business Community.
In the highly competitive wine industry, producing great-tasting wines is not enough to ensure success.
Without a super-charged sales team, even the best vintage runs the risk of gathering dust in a cellar.
For DGB, a timely technology intervention has empowered a high-performance sales team with real-time insights into sales, orders and retail execution.
Prior to the implementation of the new solution, Pieter says the business faced several challenges that were undermining its sales efforts.
“We needed a solution that would help improve product visibility in stores and ensure perfect store execution by sales representatives.”
Pieter Steyn – Commercial Manager at DGB
These ranged from a lack of accurate reporting integration of master data across platforms, to timely placing of orders and missing data from surveys.
“It was also taking too long to add new customers to our database,” adds Steyn. “We needed a solution that would help improve product visibility in stores and ensure perfect store execution by sales representatives.”
Since the implementation of SAP Sales Cloud Retail Execution, DGB has been able to capture a multitude of orders via sales representatives and routed to the call centre via the new solution.
“Sales managers also now have a view of their sales representatives’ movements for a day, and can track their visits and perfect store execution.
“This has helped drive the desired behaviour within our sales department and bring to life the benefits of the solution,” says Steyn.
Within a few days of go-live, more than 1000 visits were completed, of which 946 were recorded as Perfect Score visits based on KPIs and store performance.
The implementation of the new solution has come at a vital time, following the ongoing disruption to business-as-usual.
The system has spearheaded the ability to harness an effective sales team to build close relationships with customers which has never been more important.
Being a first of its Kind in South Africa, the implementation of the SAP system took 3 months covering high-level design, application setup, solution build and user acceptance testing.
In Kenya, Malbros, a diversified food processor with a focus on the grains, biscuits and snack products, recently automated its operations with the implementation of SAP system.
The system was provided by ACEteK Software, an Information Technology company, and will manage the businesses critical functions across sales, distribution, administration, customer service and financials, all in one, single integrated system.
Malbros has adopted the SAP Business One system, a simple to use IT solution designed specifically for growing organisations.
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