Business
Pakistan Tobacco Company manufacture and distribute their products across the country and have distributors in many towns.
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Challenge
PTC wanted to automate and manage all its sales force from one prime location - the head office. The problem was the availability of data at the head office. With salesman on the move, the time for data acquisition ranged from 2 to 3 days. Also this data was prone to errors and required considerable time for feeding.
All this delayed the critical information from being available to decision makers and marketing department. Apart from data availability PTC Management wanted different reports regarding customers, product trends, sales promotion, daily/monthly reports, etc.
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Intelligence
Our strategy was to give them a system which was not only efficient, simple, and powerful but one which would cater to their needs well into the future. We studied how exactly they sell, what they may want to further branch out to in the future, and how they go about selling.
How they wanted to keep records of their customers, sales, promotions and distribution network was also examined so that meaningful reports could be generated.
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Solution
A wireless solution to sales management and the distribution network was developed.
We designed for them a completely new architecture for data acquisition. The architecture catered to sales team management requirements, dealing with customer records, sales and promotions and statistics of customers and sales. The front end application was developed in Visual Basic so as to allow them to be able to use it on their Microsoft Windows based environment. The PDA application was developed in C language using Code Warrior IDE for Palm OS 3.0.
The solution used wireless devices for data input. The salesman enters data into the PDA application while interacting with the customers. The PDA application maintains the stock a salesman has, total sales he has performed, order data and targets.
This data is then transferred to the head office at the end of day transparently. The management can access data as soon as it is entered into the system and hence decision making becomes more intelligent and efficient. A web interface also allows the management to access the reporting features from around the globe.
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