portatour® is a quantum leap. I used to spend weeks working on maps - now planning and optimization is just a click away.
Thomas Albring,
National Sales Manager
McCain is the global market leader for frozen potato products and appetizers. Founded in 1957 in Florenceville, Canada, the company is still family-owned today and is active in over 160 countries worldwide. In Germany, McCain supports the major supermarket chains throughout the country with a field sales team of 12 district managers.
Thomas Albring is the national sales manager for the retail sector. He is responsible for the field sales team and ensures that the approximately 10,000 German supermarkets are looked after efficiently.
As national sales manager, I am responsible for our retail businessfield sales force. We look after all the supermarkets in Germany.
Thomas Albring, National Sales Manager
The impetus came with a comprehensive reorganization of the sales territories. Thomas Albring was faced with the challenge of tailoring the new territories in a meaningful way - a process that kept him busy for weeks without digital help. While searching for more efficient methods for territory optimization and route planning, he finally came across portatour®.
What began as a self-experiment with a test access quickly proved convincing: automation, intelligent optimization and simple handling led to a quick decision to introduce the system across the board. "Less effort for route planning means more time with the customers," says Thomas Albring happily.
I was faced with the challenge of somehow structuring this and then came across portatour® during my research. During the test period, it quickly became clear that we absolutely needed it.
Thomas Albring, National Sales Manager
The technical connection to the existing CRM was straightforward. The interface was established with just two coordination meetings between the CRM provider, portatour® and Thomas Albring. The field service team received training and was quickly able to work with the new system.
At the beginning, some employees were skeptical, mainly due to the new automated route planning. However, these concerns quickly disappeared and today portatour® is an integral part of the entire team's day-to-day work.
It was something new, some were skeptical: suddenly a system was interfering with their own route planning. But after a short time, nobody wanted to do without portatour® anymore.
Thomas Albring, National Sales Manager
A key advantage is the intuitive operation: new employees can plan independently after just one day of training. Access is device-independent - whether laptop, tablet or smartphone - and without long synchronization times. The benefits are particularly evident when on the move: It takes just a few clicks to adjust a route, whether to save time or to avoid traffic jams.
portatour® is really very user-friendly and it is very intuitive to use. None requires a long learning curve.
Thomas Albring, National Sales Manager
The portatour® route planner automatically takes into account the individual visit frequencies of customers, which is a clear advantage over static Excel plans. McCain uses different visit rhythms, the logic of which is automatically mapped by portatour®. The visualization of inactive customers within an area - using grey markers on the map - also helps to make sensible use of idle time.
We have three different visit rhythms and also customers with 360 days call intervals. This is automatically taken into account by portatour®.
Thomas Albring, National Sales Manager
Before portatour®, optimizing sales territories was a mammoth task that was almost impossible to manage. Thomas Albring worked with maps and markers, later also digitally, but the territories were still never really optimally planned and distributed.
The territory planning software from portatour® offers seven automatically calculated variants from which the most suitable one can be selected. The results speak for themselves: workload between the regions could be balanced, driving times reduced and rerouting avoided. At the same time, the number of customer calls increased.
Previously, one employee was at 150%, another at 64% workload. Now they are all at 100%. With portatour® we were able to distribute the workload fairly.
Thomas Albring, National Sales Manager
With portatour®, the company has taken the step from manual territory and route planning to an intelligent, digital system. The efficiency gains and significantly reduced effort lead to concrete added value for everyone involved.
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