portatour® is the best solution: fast, user-friendly, and with many options to optimize our territories in a targeted way.
Andrea Müller,
Sales Operations DACH
Ritter Sport is an established company in the FMCG sector with a focus on confectionery and chocolate. The company employs around 1,800 employees worldwide, around 1,100 of them at the Waldenbuch location. There are currently 34 district managers working in the German field sales, organized into three regions: North, Central and South.
Andrea Müller has been with the company for more than three decades and works in Sales Operations. There she acts as the central interface between the field sales force and office staff and is also involved in customer support. It is precisely this combination of operational proximity, sales understanding and many years of experience that makes her the ideal contact person for territory planning in the company.
Today, operational responsibility for territory optimization lies almost entirely with her. She receives occasional support from colleagues on the team, for example when simulated solution variants or cover arrangements are required.
For us as a company, an efficient and balanced territory structure is crucial to success in the field.
Ritter Sport had already used a system for territory planning in the past. However, it was no longer being further developed, so the company started looking for a future-proof successor solution. Several systems were evaluated during the selection process. portatour® stood out in the comparison mainly thanks to its speed, ease of use and flexibility.
It was especially important to Andrea Müller’s team that territory decisions no longer had to be made with a high level of manual effort. While the previous system basically fulfilled similar tasks, the effort involved was enormous: in some cases, individual calculations ran for two nights. This severely limited practical use.
With portatour® Territory Optimization, this changed fundamentally. Results are available much faster, and the team can now run through and evaluate different scenarios much more easily. This is a major advantage for the company, especially for controlling questions, adjustments to call intervals or call duration, and strategic territory decisions.
portatour® is brutally fast and much more user-friendly than our previous model.
The introduction of portatour® was fast and straightforward overall. One small challenge arose only due to a personnel change on Ritter Sport’s IT side. This change first had to be absorbed internally. Thanks to the close support from portatour® and helpful training materials, however, the implementation process was quickly stabilized.
During the introduction, Ritter Sport also made a conscious decision to anchor usage more strongly in the operational area and largely relieve IT. This proved to be a major advantage: “portatour® requires very little technical support and can be used independently by the specialist departments. For a company whose core business is not IT but chocolate, that is a decisive benefit,” explains Andrea Müller with a wink. Even after go-live, the support proved to be excellent: “When questions arise or special cases need to be clarified, help is available quickly.”
portatour® has the advantage that very, very little IT-side support is needed and that it can be handled very well independently in day-to-day operations.
User-friendliness is one of the points that Ritter Sport highlights particularly positively. Even without being deeply familiar with the topic of territory planning, users can find their way around comparatively quickly and achieve initial results. Andrea Müller works most intensively with the system, but substitutes also found their way around quickly. This speaks for intuitive operating logic and a practical structure.
At the same time, portatour® offers numerous settings that make it possible to adapt and simulate territories in a highly differentiated way. It is also helpful that not everything runs in a rigidly automated way. Individual requirements from the field sales force can be taken into account. Markets can be specifically fixed or assigned to certain territories, even if at first glance they are not geographically ideal. This keeps planning realistic and compatible with everyday sales practice.
Even with relatively little basic knowledge, I was able to achieve results quickly with the program.
Since the introduction of portatour®, Ritter Sport can make territory decisions much more flexibly and based on data. Where previously one large overall plan per year was practically the only realistic option, additional optimization runs and simulations are now much easier to carry out. The company has already used portatour® several times to answer specific questions, for example when hiring new field reps. The assessment of a new employee’s home location also played a major role. Such decisions can be prepared on a more solid basis with portatour® Territory Optimization than before.
The workload logic within the territories has also improved. While this was generally possible before, portatour® takes significantly more manual work off the team’s hands. This produces a reliable result faster, which can then still be supplemented with individual wishes and practical requirements. Another benefit according to Andrea Müller: “portatour® not only helps with the actual optimization, but also with working with the underlying master data. Especially with more than 10,000 customers, data quality is a central issue. portatour® makes differences and anomalies visible and thus also supports the further development of the data basis.”
With portatour®, we obtain reliable results significantly faster and can adapt our territories much more flexibly.
According to Andrea Müller, portatour® is such a good fit for the company because the software combines speed, flexibility and operational independence. The team receives reliable results quickly, can test different parameters and remains able to act without depending on IT resources. This is particularly valuable in a complex sales environment with many field reps, regional specifics and a large number of customers.
portatour® makes it possible to handle this complexity in a structured way while also taking individual requirements into account. In addition, there is the strategic added value: portatour® supports not only the actual territory optimization, but also helps the company make better decisions around workload, territory structure, data quality and personnel planning.
portatour® is perfect for Ritter Sport because the overall setup simply works.
For Ritter Sport, portatour® Territory Optimization is an effective tool for modern territory optimization in the field. The software has replaced a slow and inflexible predecessor system and now enables significantly faster, more transparent and more practical optimization processes. Above all, its high speed, ease of use and low dependence on IT resources make portatour® particularly valuable for the company.
At the same time, it is clear that the solution not only helps in day-to-day business, but also creates real added value in strategic questions around workload, home location suitability and data quality. This makes portatour® more than just a planning tool for Ritter Sport: it is an operational and analytical tool that enables better decisions in the field sales force.
portatour® is the best solution for us because speed, user-friendliness and flexibility simply fit together.
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