Client

Kalnapilis Tauras Group is the second largest brewery in Lithuania and is owned by The Danish Brewery Group.

Challenge

Kalnapilis Tauras manages a team of 38 sales agents, who are responsible for retail stock management and other duties.

Sales agents take direct retail orders from around 2500 locations throughout Lithuania. During visits to retail points, agents record the remaining Kalnapilis Tauras products in stock, the availability of marketing materials and the success of any new products. Orders were recorded on paper forms, which were later sent to the accounting department to be entered into the ERP system. One group of employees performed a quality control on the input orders. The remaining information was distributed amongst different systems and applications.

Processing of orders from one retail point took three working days and this stock management process not only suffered a number of mistakes, but also generated a lot of paper work, inefficiently processed marketing information and incorrectly measured the market reaction to new products.

Solution

To solve the stock management problems and improve the sales process, Alna Business Solutions customised and implemented its Mobile Workplace solution M-Agent. This is a web-based application for PDA with a connection to the company’s ERP system Scala through GPRS and Bluetooth technologies.

M-Agent enabled sales agents to enter/send/gather on-line information to and from the central database. Sales agents can enter any type of information into the system, including orders, stock at a retail point, personal sales and market research data. From the central database, a sales agent can also retrieve information about customers’ debts, order history, a customer visit plan for a specified period and customer visit status.

System administrators are able to generate customer visit plans for a specified period, organise market research with powerful analysis tools and enter and track the sales plans of any agent. The analysis tools allow management to supervise and optimise the sales agents’ activities.

As a result of implementing M-Agent, order-processing time has been cut from three days to one and managers now enjoy the benefits of improved activity tracking and planning, whilst Marketing and Sales benefit from more effective sales planning and improved tracking of market reactions. M-Agent also decreased the time that was required to get a new product onto the market and, additionally, led to fewer mistakes being made and less paper work generated during order processing.

Technology

The Mobile Workplace solution developed for Kalnapilis Tauras is based on the Alna Business Solutions Mobile Workplace Framework "comfort mobile" integrated with the ERP system (Scala) on-line. Mobile agents using Pocket PCs are connected to mobile phones using Bluetooth technology. Data input/output uses GPRS technology for connecting to intranet's databases and applications.

Server Software: Microsoft Windows server 2000, Alna Business Solutions Mobile Agent Framework (based on .Net technologies), Microsoft SQL 2000, Microsoft SQL 2000 OLAP, Scala 5.1 (ERP based on Microsoft SQL2000), IIS 5, C#.
Software on the client side: Microsoft SQL CE, C++.