Improving Efficiency And Productivity With Handheld PCs

Marketing Specialists began deploying Windows CE-based Handheld PCs to its sales force, and has noticed dramatic improvements in the speed and accuracy of information deliveries. The company's customers can now get information on the status of their products as soon as the information is sent, and Marketing Specialists has drastically cut paperwork while improving employee productivity.

Solution Overview

Industry
Retail sales

Profile
Marketing Specialists, based in Dallas, provides a comprehensive array of sales, marketing, merchandising, and order management services to more than 1,200 manufacturers of consumer packaged goods. It has 2,400 sales representatives operating in 36 states, and is ranked among the largest in the business.

Situation
For many years, Marketing Specialists relied on traditional industry methods of collecting information for its clients, including paper-based systems and interactive voice response, which required sales representatives to punch in responses over the phone from information gathered on sheets. Both methods were cumbersome and time-consuming for the sales representatives, and delayed the delivery of information to clients by weeks.

Solution
Marketing Specialists weighed several options, including laptop computers and palm operating system-based units, but opted for handheld PCs running Microsoft® Windows CE. They also selected RW3 for Windows CE, a leading sales force automation application. The units are Sharp Mobilon 4600s equipped with color screens, keyboards, and built-in modems.

Benefits

• Marketing Specialists has cut overall paperwork by 70%, and gained 30 minutes per day in productivity for every employee. This is helping the company streamline its own costs while providing better service to its clients.
• Manufacturers served by Marketing Specialists can now view real-time store conditions and the status of their products as soon as the information is transmitted from the field, instead of waiting weeks under the old systems. This helps them make faster, more accurate decisions based on real-time store conditions.
• The use of Windows CE allows Marketing Specialists to seamlessly integrate data collected in the field with Microsoft back office applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, Microsoft Exchange, and client applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.
• The deployment to date of 400 Sharp handheld PCs has given sales representatives highly portable and highly functional access to large, complete databases. Another 800 units are scheduled for deployment by October 1999.

---

Case Study

The easy access to huge selections of products at U.S. retail outlets masks the complexity of the packaged goods market, where margins are thin, competition is fierce, and products that don't sell disappear quickly. To keep sales going in this arena, consumer product manufacturers contract with companies such as Marketing Specialists to send sales representatives to grocery stores, mass merchandisers, and other retail outlets to conduct inventories, manage displays, and perform other vital sales tasks.

Ranked at the top of its business, Marketing Specialists pulls in more than $9 billion annually in sales for its customers who have household names such as Nestle, Nabisco, and Del Monte. Its sales force of 2,400 representatives in 36 states tally more than 14,000 store visits every month. With big numbers and big clients, providing robust sales and stellar service is a continual challenge. Not long ago, Marketing Specialists was getting bogged down in slow, inefficient paper- and phone-based information-collection systems. The company needed a better solution for serving its clients and keeping ahead of the competition. The solution was handheld PCs running the Microsoft CE operating system.

Marketing Specialists has deployed about 400 Windows CE-based units to its field sales force, with another 800 units to be rolled out in the near future. Loaded with RW3 for Windows CE, a leading sales force automation application, the solution is delivering major benefits to Marketing Specialists and its customers. The company has gained an extra half-hour per day for every sales representative equipped with a Windows CE-based unit, which helps eliminate paper and burdensome data-entry procedures. The improved efficiency has led to a 70% reduction in the company's overall paperwork, which is cutting costs and improving efficiencies.

The solution has also dramatically improved delivery of timely, accurate information from the field to manufacturers served by Marketing Specialists. This lets manufacturers quickly analyze information and react faster and more decisively to rapidly changing market conditions and events, from low supplies of a best-selling soft drink in a particular store to the results of the latest product promotion or ad campaign.

Removing the Drudgery from Daily Sales Activities

Before its Windows CE-based solution was implemented, the daily job of Marketing Specialists sales people entailed a lot of drudgery. Like other companies in the business, Marketing Specialists for years relied on paper-based data collection that was extremely slow and prone to errors. Vendors would not find out about how their products fared at specific stores until weeks after a representative made a visit, making this information much less valuable.

Then the company switched to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, in which sales reps used telephones to punch in information to recorded voice prompts.

"It was miserable to use," says Kurt Nolin executive vice president of Marketing Specialists and corporate vice president of retail operations at the company's Dallas headquarters. "Entering data through the IVR takes a lot of time — as much as 30 minutes or more for every sales rep, who have to go through a tedious automated response system while reading off sheets where he or she had written the data."

Nolin says the automation of the paper-based processes using the Windows CE-based Handheld PCs eliminated the need to enter data multiple times while capturing data at the time of origin.

"With the Windows CE-based units," he continues, "that same process now takes about 90 seconds to transmit data back to our headquarters, and it's a lot more fun to use. It's really raised the morale of the sales force. We are also deriving additional benefits from an unexpected effect of fast, two-way electronic communications — it has forced everyone to be more concise in their messages. This is driving a noticeable productivity benefit."

"The Windows CE-based solution provides information to our customers almost instantaneously, instead of requiring weeks to find out about store conditions. They can make quick decisions on key business drivers such as advertisements, pricing, and shelf strategies. Moreover, they can fix problems quickly."

Kurt Nolin
Executive Vice President and Corporate Vice President of Retail Operations
Marketing Specialists

Handheld PCs Prove To Be The Best Option

Getting to the current solution involved ruling out alternatives to handheld PCs. Marketing Specialists, which uses Microsoft products for its desktops and back-end operations, initially considered laptops. But the combined cost of the laptops and peripherals made them too expensive. And based on the industry's experience with laptops, the company knew laptops were easy targets for thieves, which led sales reps to focus more on keeping the laptops in sight than on providing additional services to the stores they were visiting.

The company also considered proprietary sales force automation devices, but ruled them out because of their limited functionality and restrictive development environments that precluded future application development options.

"The company wanted pieces of hardware that were highly portable so sales reps could always carry the hardware with them, yet flexible enough to include the rich functionality that Marketing Specialists required," says Bruce Nagle, president and CEO of RW3 Information Technologies, based in San Ramon, CA. "When Marketing Specialists heard about our RW3 for Windows CE solution, the company realized that was exactly what it needed."

Nagle says Windows CE is an ideal operating system for companies such as Marketing Specialists because it offers a number of valuable features, including:

• A variety of form factors that give companies a wide range of hardware choices. In the case of Marketing Specialists, they use the Sharp Mobilon 4600 series Handheld PC, which includes a color screen and built-in modem. Nagle says notebook computers are too expensive and lack the quick-access functionality of Handheld PCs, while Palm operating system-based units, such as the Palm Pilot and Palm III, lack keyboards, a requisite for Marketing Specialist reps.
• High performance options in the hardware. For example, the Sharp units can have up to 32MB RAM, which enables the robust operation of data-rich sales force applications.
• Tight integration with backend systems. For Marketing Specialists, this means seamless links between field information and backend systems and applications that include Microsoft SQL Server™ 7.0, Microsoft Exchange and the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, and Microsoft Office.
• A rich development environment. This helps RW3 customize its applications for each customer with the same Windows-based development tools used for Microsoft Windows NT® and the Windows 95/98 operating systems. RW3 uses the Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++?reg; and Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) for Windows CE, along with Microsoft Visual Studio® development system.

Building A Turnkey Solution Using Windows CE

RW3 for Windows CE is a customized, turnkey solution that enables Marketing Specialists to quickly deploy handheld PCs to the field.

"For each client, such as Marketing Specialists, we design a customized database that provides an instant window on every outlet where a manufacturer's products are sold. There are software modules that support critical activities such as the introduction of new products," Nagle says. "Using Windows CE as our core, we are able to actively identify and code in best practices, so our customers don't have to reinvent the wheel."

The RW3 application presents a user interface that is easy for sales reps to learn and use, yet contains powerful, complete functionality. It includes check-off boxes, drop-down menus, and other features of the familiar Windows interface that help the reps enter information such as the specific store visited and the quantities of particular products available on shelves. For example, a sales representative might note the number of cans of tomato sauce on the shelves and in the back room. The vendor could then use this information, for example, to determine when the next shipment may be expected. Nolin says the company is planning to use the Windows CE-based units for transmissions of planograms, the schematics used by the industry that give precise locations for where every product is located in each store. Product location, Nolin adds, is critical to product manufacturers because it affects sales.

The RW3 application includes easy-to-use drop down lists for matching retail outlets to products.

Microsoft and Sales and Marketing Automation