TUNAP and the portatour^® route planner

About TUNAP

TUNAP is among the largest European manufacturers of aerosols and is an innovation leader in many areas – from products for the automobile after market to brands in the industrial and private fields. TUNAP is represented worldwide in 22 locations from Europe, China, and Singapore to Brazil. The company has more than 800 employees.

www.tunap.com

The TUNAP field sales force is tasked with visiting automobile service centers and fostering customer contact through direct sales. A representative completes 10 customer calls a day on average. Along with telephone sales and the online shop, the field sales force is the most important sales channel, especially for presenting products that require explanation and for demonstrating their benefits.

Why route planning?

The routes had previously been planned manually by the field sales force, according to a slicing methodology, with every daily route corresponding to one slice of the whole sales territory pie.

The problem with this is that every year about 10% of the visited companies close, but the routes were rarely rescheduled effectively. Gaps ought to be filled with new potential customers and the existing customer base has to be handled optimally in order to fulfill the sales targets. This led to an unmanageable planning burden.

It was important to the field sales force to spend time with customers and not on the road. However, the manual route planning process was laborious and so in practice planning lacked the necessary efficiency.

Sebastian Zimmermann
TUNAP Sales Control / Customer Management

Although the sales management set sales targets for each field sales representative, it was not possible to gain an overview of the number and frequency of calls. The management did not have a clear picture of what was going on in the field.

It was necessary to bring our field sales force up to the latest technological standards, which we found in portatour^®.

Efficient route planning with portatour^®

portatour^® considerably improved our whole sales and distribution system. We specified a targeted strategy for handling a sales territory. Active and potential customers were evaluated and visited with different call frequencies, according to their level of priority. The actual daily planning is still carried out by the field sales representatives themselves, but it is significantly supported by the automation of portatour^®.

Before the implementation of portatour^® the customer base had decreased for two successive years. The introduction of portatour^® at the beginning of 2014 reversed this trend, with the customer base increasing by 6% within 9 months. Former customers who had stopped ordering were reactivated.

The field sales representatives now consistently record each visit in portatour^® on their tablet computer. The resulting statistics have become a central source of information for our management.

With portatour^® it is easy to test new call strategies with some of the field sales representatives and to evaluate the results, and if these are successful then we can apply them quickly to the whole sales force.

Efficient reporting with portatour^®

It is often a problem for a field sales force to input reports consistently. At TUNAP, the entry forms in portatour^® were set up in a user-friendly manner, so as to enable swift recording of data entries. The events occurring most frequently during a visit were pre-configured as reporting options. In the future, the adaptable data entry forms of portatour^® will enable even more data to be gathered during a customer visit in order to support the other sales channels such as the online shop and telephone sales.

Implementing portatour^®

TUNAP was made aware of portatour^® by one of its own field sales representatives, who first discovered portatour^® for himself. Compared to other options, portatour^® soon emerged as the best dynamic route planning solution for TUNAP.

In terms of usability, flexibility, and completeness of features, portatour^® is the best solution for us. Other suppliers only offered central planning, denying our field sales force any influence or possibility to react quickly and independently to changing situations.

The pilot phase went smoothly. The “12 tips for successfully deploying route-planning software to field reps” recommended by the portatour^® team were followed in a targeted manner, for example selecting motivated pilot users who were open to the idea and then served as positive promoters.

The initial skepticism on account of the costs soon dissipated. The investment into portatour^® has been worth it! The costs are covered by just one single additional order per month by each field sales representative who uses it.

portatour^® is the basis for the improvement of our sales. I can fully recommend portatour^® without any limitations.