The sales manager of British American Tobacco (BAT) wanted to reconsider the assignment of customers to his sales team of 20 representatives. He believed that the sales operations could be made more efficient by the rebalancing of the sales territories and by optimizing the monthly schedule of sales routes. Solvice was asked to support this process and to implement a solution for future improvements.
The sales department of British American Tobacco consists of a team of 20 representatives that service customers and prospects on a daily basis. In order to streamline these operations, the customers are assigned to the individual representatives and the schedules that include the planned visits are made on a monthly basis. Both the customer assignments and the schedules require manual interventions. The sales manager identified a potential for improvements, if an optimization engine would support these processes.
Solvice provided an analysis of both the currents assignments, based on historic data, and an optimized assignment for the sales team. The latter consists of balanced territories that take into account the customer locations, specific customer preferences and other business rules. In addition, Solvice implemented a solution to automatically schedule customer visits, according to their location on optimal sales routes.
British American tobacco’s sales efforts can now be more effective. The support of optimization in both the territories and the sales routes allows more visits to be performed daily (up to 35%). In addition, the new customer assignments balance future sales efforts and monthly schedules can be generated automatically.
Volume7 is a product-focused software development agency for enterprise & high-growth companies.