from DION HENRICK in Cape Town
CAPE TOWN, (CAJ News) – ONE of South Africa’s largest independent wine and spirit producers and distributors, DGB, has made the most of a timely technology intervention.
This has empowered a high-performance sales team with real-time insights into sales, orders and retail execution.
DGB chose the SAP Sales Cloud Retail Execution (ReX) solution and worked with implementation partner, Consnet, to design and introduce the solution into the business.
Despite the implementation of the solution being the first of its kind in South Africa, the implementation team managed to finish the high-level design, application setup, solution build and user acceptance testing within a mere three months.
Pieter Steyn, Commercial Manager at DGB, said the business faced several challenges that were undermining its sales efforts.
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,” added 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.
Cameron Beveridge, Regional Director for Southern Africa at SAP, believes the implementation of the new solution has come at a vital time.
“In light of the events of the past year and the ongoing disruption to business-as-usual, the ability to harness an effective sales team to build close relationships with customers has never been more important,” Beveridge said.
DGB was formally established in 1990, although its roots stretch back more than 300 years when wine-making commenced at the historic Boschendal and Bellingham farms in the Cape Winelands.
– CAJ News