Nestle's Malaysia enhances customer service and sales performance with Motorola mobile solution

"The Motorola Sales Force Automation system has replaced Nestle Malaysia·s manual order taking procedures, which helped us transform the sales force, tremendously increasing efficiency and putting us on the road to achieving our vision of FLAWLESS EXECUTION"
-Ganesan A., Sales Director, Nestle (Malaysia)

Company Overview:

Headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, Nestle employs over 250,000 people in more than 500 factories and offices in 80 countries around the world, making it the world's largest food company.

Its mission, to bring the best and most relevant products to people, wherever they are, whatever their needs and throughout their lives, is the driving factor behind Nestle's ongoing goal to grow through innovation and constantly reinventing itself. At the country level, Nestle is committed to adapting to local needs, while supporting global product lines. With this commitment, long term potential is never sacrificed for short term gains.

The Challenge : Manual inventory management process and insufficient information

Nestle sells an extensive range of grocery products through its own sales force, and distributors' sales forces. In their daily visit to the customers, the sales teams are expected to perform a number of different activities such as market surveys, asset tracking and merchandiser audits to gather customer and market intelligence. However, most activities have traditionally been carried out manually using pen and paper. This resulted in lost time and was prone to data entry errors. Manual processes also often lacked checking mechanisms.

As a result, the accuracy of secondary sales data has always been a key concern. Another challenge was with the way information was managed. When a sales person was on site with a customer, he or she often lacked the necessary information on hand to respond to basic questions such as stock availability, product information, order status or current pricing. What they needed was a tool to sell the right product range at the right outlet, in the right channel and with right promotional activity.

"To enable us to scale our operations efficiently and cost - effectively, we needed to look for new technology and solutions that would increase productivity many fold, without necessarily increasing cost," said Patrick Goh, Sales Project Manager, Nestle (Malaysia).

The Solution : Customisable and manageable Sales Force Automation (SFA) system for Nestle's sales force and distributors

Using the News Page Mobility Framework, Nestle created a mobile SFA system for its sales force sales supervisors, distributors and merchandise on Motorola's Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDAJ, namely the PPT8800, 8866 and MC50 series. The SFA system has applications that are customisable and manageable which Nestle distributors and merchandisers in different markets can quickly and easily customise according to their customers' and business requirements.

Motorola EDAs are handheld devices that offer enterprise class wireless connectivity, functionality, and manageability, enabling real time access to people and business essential applications. Data is synchronised and downloaded into the handheld device for up to date data at the beginning of a work day, thus giving the users access to information wherever they are. "Sales transaction data is now updated regularly throughout the day, so Nestle's management team can have daily visibility of sales activities ' said Goh. ' With barcode scanning capability on the EDAs, the sales personnel can easily capture customer information, product details, customer codes and print out receipts immediately on mobile printers, therefore minimizing manual errors and improving overall efficiency. At the same time, to ensure the sales personnel make physical calls according to the Journey plan, they are required to scan the outlet barcode.

Furthermore, the EDAs are built specifically to endure all-day everyday use within the office environment and out on the road, reducing operating and support costs leading to a lower total cost of ownership. "Nestle chose Motorola's solution over other competing solutions primarily on the ease of use functionality and cost - benefit factors. Scanning is a key function in our sales operations and the products were superior as compared to other competing solutions. The cost-benefit offered was also a key deciding factor,' added Goh. The NewsPage SFA solution running on Motorola devices has been rolled out to more than 71 distributors and 600 field-force in Nestle Malaysia and Singapore. The training involved one to three days of extensive hands-on briefings with demonstrations on usage, live order taking, and how-to-use modules. This is now a pre-requisite to. becoming a Nestle Distributor in Malaysia and will be used by more than 200 salesmen in Hong Kong, Australia and the entire Asia Pacific region, Oceania, Middle East and Africa.

Motorola EDAs are handheld devices that offer enterprise class wireless connectivity, functionality, and manageability, enabling real time access to people and business essential applications.

The Benefits : Increased sales force productivity

The SFA system has replaced Nestle Malaysia's manual order taking procedures, which helped the sales force to increase the efficiency of information flow tremendously resulting in:
- Improved data accuracy
- Improved customer service
- Better secondary sales data
- Improved sales productivity Improved overall employee morale / professionalism and self esteem.

Nestle Malaysia won the 2007 MIS Asia IT Excellence Award-Best Business Enabler (Manufacturing). Internally, Nestle Malaysia SFA system has been recognised as "best practice" for sales force automation and other countries are using them as a benchmark. With information literally in its hands, Nestle's sales force has increased its efficiency and productivity as it now has readily available information of its inventory, sales history, order status and product pricing. Consequentially, sales people are able to assist customers to make faster and well informed decisions. "An informed person is a better sales person. So the information that he or she can access from the handheld devices goes so far as to track the sales history of customers. Tight integration with the back end processes was critical and vendors helped us to deploy this successfully, end to end. These new processes have improved customer satisfaction, and more importantly, boosted morale and effectiveness within the sales teams," said Goh.

By the end of 2006, 95 percent of total distributor sales representatives were using Motorola handheld devices. The number of outlets covered has increased to more than 90,000, up more than a 100 percent from 2004. The average monthly sales measurements have been built into the Journey Plan for each outlet for each sales representative. The Journey Plan adherence is transparent and is a measurement for productivity gains. "At the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line. driving efficiency up and costs down, while enablmg faster decision making are key priorities for the business. By tightly integrating Motorola's mobility solution and services with our chosen sales force automation software and back office operations, we now have an end to end solution that has a direct impact on our success as a company," said Goh.

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