Managing business contacts in SAP SD

Established in 1990, the family-owned plastic sheet company is growing rapidly, opening new warehouses and branches in more Polish cities. Our country’s growing advertising market, expanding industry and construction sector favor Tuplex.

Other Central and Eastern European countries are also experiencing a similar boom, with Tuplex opening more branches. The company is successively expanding its product range, establishing partnerships with the world’s largest manufacturers, as well as launching private label products.

For management and logistics

Maintaining the growth momentum required support from advanced IT solutions. Since the beginning of 2009, Tuplex has been using the SAP system, which has been used to cover the company’s key business areas: financial accounting and fixed asset management, controlling and warehouse along with purchasing and sales management. The company also uses SAP data warehouse.

When starting work with SAP, Tuplex’s greatest expectations were for management accounting tools and its reporting. Real-time information available on individual segments of the company, e.g. sales volume of specific materials and its profitability, results of branches, seasonality of sales, etc., form the basis for management decisions and creation of further plans.

An equally important area – obvious in a distribution company – was solutions to support logistics, particularly warehouse management for the high-bay warehouse and functionality for handling purchasing.

Krzysztof Dudzinski, Director of Logistics and IT at Tuplex

Squeeze more out of SAP

After achieving the implementation’s business objectives and streamlining logistics processes, it was time to review the SAP system’s capabilities for further improvement of the company’s operations.

As part of another project, carried out jointly with BCC (currently All for One Poland), Tuplex decided to reflect in the system the sales support processes carried out operationally in the company’s various branches, using the tools available in SAP ERP.

To this end, the sales and distribution area was expanded (SAP SD) of the SAP system with functionalities for managing sales activities (CAS – Computer-Aided Selling).

The most important expectations for the tool included the ability to plan and reflect sales activities of salespeople and consultants in the system. In addition, sales support processes were to be fully integrated with SD solutions to enable the creation of a full sales workflow.

The functionality for recording sales activities was linked to pre-existing processes and documents in the SD module (quotations, sales orders), which allowed a comprehensive analysis of sales activities.

Customer data, merchant data

In order to efficiently support pre-sales processes, the customer master data used in the SAP system at Tuplex has been expanded to include the ability to comprehensively manage contact persons with whom direct sales activities are conducted. Information on contact persons at customers is noted in the system, along with their position and organizational division, as well as contact data – phone numbers, e-mail addresses.

In order to efficiently manage the data of employees in sales departments (consultants, salespeople), an additional functionality from SAP HR was implemented to reflect the organizational structure of the sales department (HR-OM).

With the data of salespeople now available in the system (within the structure of the sales department), it is possible to directly link Tuplex employees to people at customers and indicate the sales supervisor and assign a subject matter consultant for each customer.

Registration of commercial activities

Since the implementation of sales activity management functionality at Tuplex, all sales-related activities of the company’s employees have been recorded in the SAP system. By reflecting the different types of activity in different communication channels (phone, visit, e-mail), the company has the knowledge of who contacted a particular customer, at what time and on what issue.

The sales representative enters information in the SAP system about each visit and meeting with the customer – the reason for the visit, the status of the visit, the result and with whom the meeting took place are reported in a simple and clear way in the activity recording transaction.

According to a similar scheme, consultants who contact customers by phone also make notes in the system for each call.

The register of sales activities has made it possible to improve the management of customer relations and the planning and control of sales staff time. The system provides information about the offers made, the frequency of contact and the effectiveness of these marketing activities. It is also always known who contacted the customer. This makes it easier to maintain a consistent sales policy towards specific customer groups and to plan marketing activities.

Another important aspect is a consistent database of contacts and contact history available in one place.

As Krzysztof Dudzinski points out, “In a distribution company like Tuplex, reliable, complete and continuously updated information about customers is one of the most important resources of the company. Previously, we had information from SAP about relationships and settlements with contractors already after the customer said: buy. We lacked systematized knowledge of pre-sales processes. We also did not have a consistent knowledge base of customer contacts and relationships. Phone numbers, information about offers made, reasons for rejection or acceptance – this was the salespeople’s workbench, and the company ran the risk of losing this knowledge when a salesperson left the company, for example."

Registration of sales activities in the system can be linked to the incentive system by making salesmen’s bonus payments dependent on the completeness and timeliness of sales activity notes or the number of customer visits made.

Calendar

As part of the launched functionality, users of the solution – salespeople and consultants – have a calendar at their disposal, where they can plan activities and keep track of the degree of task completion. In addition to the activities carried out with the client, the user using the calendar has the possibility to record in it other internal tasks, such as time spent preparing an offer, traveling to the client. This is a significant facilitation in effective work time planning. The calendar is easy to use, with a simple and ergonomic user interface.

In addition (within defined permissions), other users, such as supervisors or people who coordinate the work of salespeople, can review and add new tasks to their schedule and organize their work in such a way as to direct the right sales activities to the right customers, which affects the coordination of contacts with customers.

Customer in SAP – from SD to CRM

The range of IT tools used in a company for customer relationship management largely depends on the size of the company, the profile of its business, the number and structure of its customers. As part of the solutions offered, SAP has a number of tools to support these processes. In companies that cooperate with a limited number of regular customers and therefore maintain a small sales department and do not conduct many extensive marketing campaigns, the needed solutions are provided by the sales and distribution area of the SAP ERP system. Additional functionalities available as part of it, such as Computer-Aided Selling, Customer Interaction Center for call center operation or Customer Service module extend the basic range of capabilities, taking into account the specifics of the company. In addition to the standard SAP solutions, it is also possible to implement additional applications to better utilize the potential of the information gathered in the system. Such a tool is Single Customer View, an in-house application prepared by BCC, which provides complete information about a selected customer on a single screen. In companies that carry out extensive and multi-stage sales processes, serve a large number of diversified customers, divided into segments, and as a result, the sales department employs dozens or even hundreds of people in different branches, the natural choice is SAP CRM. The tools available in SAP CRM provide comprehensive support for customer data and sales processes, and also support the organization of marketing campaigns. SAP CRM also provides extensive analytical capabilities. The flexible structure of the tool allows you to easily adapt it to the needs and specifics of your business.

Better analysis of activities

Thanks to comprehensive operational knowledge of the activities carried out with a given customer, managers of individual branches and enterprise-wide sales managers obtain consistent, transparent and reliable information about the sales processes carried out.

This allows for aggregate quantitative and qualitative analysis of activities by selected criteria and comparison of their effectiveness from period to period.

The released solution has also allowed Tuplex to better respond to customer needs and manage contacts more effectively. The system helps catch duplicate activity scheduled with a given customer and “makes sure" that a dedicated salesperson contacts them.

Comparison of complex offers with actual sales volume to a given customer and analysis of customers’ buying potential for specific product groups allow more effective inventory planning and management of available assortment.

Linking sales contacts to bid documents and sales orders gives you the ability to observe and analyze the overall sales pipeline, which ultimately allows you to make sales management decisions based on the most up-to-date information.