Johannesburg, 12 Mar 2014
In a five-month project for Peninsula Beverage Company (PenBev), the local bottler of Coca-Cola products in the Western and Northern Cape, Britehouse has built a mobile app focused on giving all PenBev employee levels a 360^0 view of their customers.
PenBev manufactures and distributes the widest range of non-alcoholic beverages in the region, while supporting retailers and traders with on-time deliveries, signage and coolers, in-store advertising and promotions.
"Our previous mobile Salesforce mobile solution enabled our sales reps to improve order taking in the field and did permit a limited amount of account management," says PenBev CIO, Bruce Carter. "However, we wanted to improve our sales and service by enabling everyone involved in those activities, not just the reps, to see and work with customer data. We also wanted to ensure that the business processes we had designed specifically to improve the customer experience were being followed in the field.
"This necessitated extending our Salesforce.com functionality into the field and giving all our sales and management teams the means to access field data in real-time and adjust live field activities pretty much on the fly."
Britehouse was tasked with building an app that would integrate Salesforce.com CRM functionality with a handheld device (in this case, the iPad) and with PenBev's SAP sales, distribution, and business intelligence modules.
The app needed to include satellite navigation capabilities and Google maps, to help sales people reach customers quickly and easily. CRM functionality had to include the ability to update customer contact details on-site, check signage, marketing collateral, and merchandising, introduce current specials, check assets in the form of coolers and product, and, via a Salesforce.com algorithm, model a new stock order based on seasonal and other criteria.
The app also had to give any management team member visibility into the past eight weeks of data, such as actual sales versus targets, in each customer outlet.
"GSM connectivity challenges in South Africa haven't changed much since mobile devices were introduced years ago," Carter says. "So we needed an implementation partner that was not only capable of building the app itself, but had a track record of overcoming bandwidth and other challenges confronting field employees from densely populated urban areas to remote rural areas.
"We went straight to Britehouse. This was no fairy-tale project and we needed an organisation that would deliver when the chips were down. They delivered."
Britehouse Cobus Bron says the exceptional commitment to the success of project by the PenBev team made meeting the deadlines and budget requirements easier. "Too many companies think that enterprise mobility is about writing some code and sticking it on a device. Actually, enterprise mobility is a broad-ranging discipline that covers a multitude of business and IT issues, from business processes, governance, and compliance to data flow from the device to the back-office servers, performance on the device, and keeping the device both intuitive and easy to use.
"Designing an app to be utterly relevant to a customer's business is a highly specialised discipline - and can be successful only if the customer collaborates closely. PenBev gave us everything we needed, including their full support with change management and training.
"As a consequence, we were able to give them, through a single interface, a future-proofed mobile system that is adaptable to new devices and evolving processes and extensible over multiple platforms and operating systems."
PenBev's new mobile system is delivering early benefits. However, Carter, believes the advantages conferred on the business by the project will increase progressively more and across a wider spectrum of business activities as the company capitalises on the information and management options the system makes available.
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