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Field Sales Force Automation for Publisher

A major national magazine merchandising company needed an automated system to ensure fulfillment, placement and competitive brand management at point-of-purchase locations.  Windows Mobile and Microsoft CRM partnered to effectively meet this need.
 

 Business Need

 
A major national magazine merchandising company was looking for an automated system to ensure fulfillment, placement and competitive brand management at point-of-purchase locations such as book stores and airport magazine sections.  They also needed new ways to optimize data collection and management of their paper based national merchandising field sales force.
 

 Solution

 

Vision

The customer envisioned an electronic system that would eliminate paper and scanning, enable real time reporting for sales managers and executives and allow electronic collection of ordinary sales data, as well as escalation of point of sale issues.  After sending out an RFP to several vendors, Eastridge and a leading national consulting company for Microsoft CRM came together and proposed a solution that leveraged the power of Microsoft CRM with the flexibility of Windows Mobile devices.

Architecture

Eastridge worked with the customer and a nationally recognized Microsoft CRM partner to build an integrated merchandising solution for the field sales personnel using Panasonic Windows Vista machines (with bar code readers), incorporating data visualization with Microsoft CRM and SQL Server Reporting Services.  Eastridge built two separate functional proof of concepts based upon ruggedized laptops in the field and Windows Mobile devices.
 

 Benefits

 
Reports from the field that used to take several weeks are now visible daily through sales management and executive dashboards.  The customer also has the additional benefit of greatly reduced fraudulent store visit reports from part-time merchandisers, as well as the ability to electronically assign and monitor store visits from remote locations.  In some cases, reports containing clear evidence of fraudulent store visits allowed the customer to quickly eliminate problem personnel and immediately gain increased revenue from each store visit.
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