portatour® was streets ahead of any other option we looked at.
Stephen Bogod,
Director
D R Kitchen Appliances is the UK distributor of premium kitchen appliances from Italian manufacturer Elica. As part of a family-owned business dating back to 1895, the company combines decades of experience with a modern sales approach.
Stephen Bogod, Director and responsible for IT and business systems, led the implementation of portatour® to support six field sales representatives and integrate route planning seamlessly into the company's existing ERP environment.
We've been going since 1895. We're a very, very long-established company.
Before introducing portatour®, sales representatives planned their routes manually by selecting customers within a region. As the number of accounts grew into the hundreds, this process became increasingly inefficient.
The company recognized early that optimized route planning was essential to maximize customer visits and ensure every account received the attention it deserved.
It was self-evident that it was going to be a very difficult job to do it without the aid of automated route planning.
The implementation was completed smoothly and included a full integration with the company's ERP and CRM systems. Thanks to the flexibility of portatour® and the close collaboration with the implementation team, D R Kitchen Appliances was able to tailor the solution to its own workflows without disrupting daily operations. Even initially sceptical sales representatives quickly embraced the system.
The implementation went very smooth. I was impressed.
Although D R Kitchen Appliances currently focuses on automatic route planning, the company already sees additional potential in portatour®'s territory analysis capabilities.
Stephen Bogod values the option of further optimizing sales territories as the business continues to grow and views it as a logical next step for the future.
The key improvements are the amount of time they can spend visiting rather than planning, and the number of customers that they can call.
For D R Kitchen Appliances, the biggest strengths of portatour® are its flexibility, seamless ERP integration and extensive customization options.
User-defined fields, URL links and tailored reporting allow the sales team to access all relevant customer information in one place while adapting the software precisely to their business processes.
I like the integration, the flexibility of it. We could get it to work the way we wanted to work.
Since introducing portatour®, sales representatives spend significantly less time planning and more time visiting customers. Forgotten accounts have largely become a thing of the past, reporting is faster, and call documentation is more efficient through integrated voice notes. Overall, the solution enables the team to focus on customer relationships instead of administrative work.
It allowed us to visit a lot more customers that we previously had either forgotten or simply hadn't had the time to see.
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