SODIS is optimizing the routes of its field sales staff, responsible for managing Ducros and Vahiné shelf space in large and medium-sized supermarkets.
SODIS, a field marketing specialist, opted for GEOCONCEPT’s sales districting and route optimization solutions to optimize its 150 field sales promoters’ calls.
About SODIS :
- Subsidiary of the McCormick Group, a world leader in flavors
- established 1984
- around 280 employees
- 150 field sales staff covering the whole of France
- present in more than 4,500 sales outlets
- 120,000 store visits each year
The challenge facing SODIS: to optimize the movements of its field sales promoters and to improve service quality.
A subsidiary of the McCormick Group (a world leader in flavors), SODIS is a major field marketing player specialized in managing and optimizing shelf space for the Ducros and Vahiné brands. The company’s aim is to promote these brands’ new products and to make it easy for shoppers to find the spices, peppers and other baking ingredient products they need in more than 4,500 stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets throughout France.
Organized into 20 regional teams, the SODIS field sales staff pay more than 120,000 store visits a year, representing a distance travelled of around 5 million kilometers.
The company was looking to optimize its field sales promotion staff’s routes to reduce mileage and time spent on the road, with the added bonus of increased efficiency, productivity and working comfort.
Having accurate and relevant data at its disposal is also a strategic issue for SODIS, which wants to respond efficiently to Ducros and Vahiné objectives and offer these brands’ customers the very best quality service. With call schedules initially generated from its sales staff’s experience of the ground, SODIS decided to turn to a solution making it possible to automate route planning and obtain a comprehensive analysis of the information on field sales promotion staff movements (travel time, mileage, customer constraints...).
GEOCONCEPT's answer: TourSolver and Territory Manager
SODIS decides to turn to GEOCONCEPT and deploy TourSolver, a software solution that automates and optimizes route plan management.
Piloted from the company's geomarketing cell, this tool enables SODIS to define optimized call plans.
As a bonus, in certain regions, productivity gains of up to 15% in journey time and 20% lower mileage.
« Thanks to the TourSolver solution, field sales staff paying store visits enjoy greater flexibility and working comfort and can concentrate more on their core business of point-of-sale service », ”, says SODIS CEO, Cyril Gache.
« Beyond the tangible statistical results, our field teams feel better supported and can take better account of new brand constraints. »
A few months after implementing TourSolver, SODIS decides to complement the solution with the advanced Territory Manager sectoring solution, to achieve an overall view of the call sectors and standardize headcount allocation by region. This additional analysis also made it possible to define route organization on a bigger scale and better balance field employee workload in the various sectors.
Achieve greater leverage of geomarketing tools to optimize daily activities
Encouraged by its success in deploying the TourSolver and Territory Manager tools, SODIS now wants to extract greater benefit from geomarketing tools to optimize its day-to-day activities, thereby:
• cutting field request response times,
• better defining the locations where future employees will be recruited,
• scheduling fields routes to replace employees when they are on vacation.
As part of this project, the company intends to deploy the Geoconcept Sales & Marketing solution to analyze the various sales outlets’ catchment areas and create thematic analyses by region so as to define and reorganize field sales promoters’ call territories. This will improve customer service quality thanks to an appropriate route organization that takes account of the customers’ quantitative and qualitative objectives. “Our teams recognize the relevance and efficiency of GEOCONCEPT’s tools. If we have achieved our initial objective of a 15% reduction in travel time in a number of regions, we are certain that this objective is achievable at the national level in France by optimizing the use of geomarketing solutions”, says Cyril Gache. “We are therefore keen to improve our migration support for these tools, in particular by integrating them with our GPS and ERP systems.”
TourSolver
TourSolver vehicle route optimization software is now available for the Geoconcept Geographic Information System.
Territory Manager
Territory redistricting and balancing
Territory Manager for Geoconcept module allows creating balanced customers portfolio and optimized sectors...