Rivella: fresh sales processes with ORBIS Consumer Suite from the Microsoft Cloud

By introducing the ORBIS Consumer Suite – a modern mobile app – and the BI solution ORBIS iControl, Rivella is taking an important step towards optimizing its Internal Sales and Field Service processes and its sales reporting activities. Internal Sales can plan both the capacity and the assignments of Field Service staff in a largely automated and thus efficient manner, while Field Service receives support with organizing customer visits and benefits from “click-optimized” data entry. Detailed analyses provide Management with a sound basis for improved sales controlling activities.

Rising temperatures in summer cause you to start sweating and your body to lose more fluids. When that happens, it is absolutely essential to drink plenty. Popular thirst quenchers include natural, healthy and alcohol-free soft drinks – a fact that Rivella AG – established in 1952 in Rothrist, Switzerland – is delighted about. Rivella has been the most popular soft drink in Switzerland for a long time – and demand is steadily rising abroad too. In 2015, a record of 26 million liters were sold in the export business – with output totaling 107 million liters.

Rivella’s success is based on its beverages’ unique recipe. Depending on the variety – such as Red, Blue, Green Tea, Peach or Rhubarb – the drinks are made of 35 or 25% milk whey and a secret blend of natural herbal and fruit extracts. Top quality has always been the focus of the company’s production activities. The soft drinks are sold to the food services industry and to end consumers through beverage distributors and retailers.

But competition is fierce. So Management is making lots of adjustments to ensure that the family-owned company – which generated net sales of CHF 144.9 million in 2015 – can continue its sustainable and profitable growth trajectory in the future too. The business-critical factors in this regard include high-efficiency sales processes – especially in Field Service.

Rivella is a huge step closer to this goal due to the introduction of ORBIS Consumer Suite powered by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online – a cloud-based CRM industry solution – and a contemporary mobile app based on the “Resco Mobile CRM App for Microsoft Dynamics”. The applications replace outdated CRM software. Additionally, both capacity planning and organization of Field Service staff deployments had not previously been carried out in the CRM solution. Instead, this was done in a cumbersome and time-consuming way in Microsoft Excel.

“ORBIS’s CRM cloud solution and the mobile app met our requirements best in terms of integration, performance, scalability and future viability. We were also convinced by the ORBIS consultants’ in-depth process and industry knowledge,” commented Axel Kuhn (Head of Sales at Rivella AG). The CRM solution can be run on mobile devices on all the common platforms – Microsoft Windows, Google Android or Apple iOS. The around 75 users in Sales can quickly and easily complete their tasks thanks to the intuitive user interface.

Field Service representatives’ registered appointments or absences and the promotions (i.e. the planning data for promotions on retail customers’ premises) are used and combined with one another for the calculation. The experts at ORBIS Switzerland have developed brand-new functions for this very purpose and integrated them in the CRM software as a separate module, which is available to all ORBIS customers. The data is correlated and connected using an algorithm.

Field Service is also delighted about the improvements and simplifications. Based on the stored worklist, the CRM solution automatically supports the team with suggested appointments when planning the order of visits. Since each Field Service representative attends between ten and twelve appointments per day, this makes things a great deal easier and saves a lot of time. In addition, the employee can use the CRM cloud software’s integrated analysis functions to check where they stand at any time and which customers they still need to visit.

Field Service representatives now enter data as part of the distribution survey, adjust master data, or arrange the next appointment directly on site on customers’ premises if they place an order. This is the very heart of mobile data acquisition. “Since all the data is entered in a single user interface, Field Service is working in a ‘click-optimized’ manner and has become far more efficient,” explained Monika Hess (Head of Internal Sales at Rivella AG). If specific expenses are incurred during a visit, they can be entered into the CRM solution using the web client.

Data entry is extremely convenient, since it is done using a convertible tablet – either with the keyboard or the touchscreen, using a finger or a stylus – and the response times are also very fast. The information collected online or offline during the likes of order placement is processed in the background, and the mobile app immediately generates the corresponding data records. As soon as a mobile device’s online connection is restored, the data is transferred directly to the CRM system, where it is immediately available to Internal Sales. This gives them a clear view of what is happening at the point of sale at all times.

The fact that Internal Sales can also use the CRM solution to view information on the customers supplied directly from the SAP ERP system further increases transparency in the sales processes. In turn, sales data from the ORBIS Consumer Suite (such as purchase orders) is automatically incorporated into the ERP software, where it is further processed and posted. The ORBIS SAP Integration Suite takes over linkage and data exchange between CRM and ERP.

Last but not least, both Management and Sales Management are benefiting from the new solutions too, since Management can now rely on detailed and informative evaluations for sales controlling and decision-making activities. ORBIS iControl – a business intelligence (BI) solution linked to the ORBIS Consumer Suite – provides the necessary KPI reports in a clear graphical charts. This enables creation of the likes of what are known as “site reports”, which provide promotion analyses by combining a variety of aspects, such as the number of open and completed visits per employee and the business activities answered.