Initial Situation

This pharmaceutical company is currently distributing its products in United Kingdom through wholesalers. However, there are some accounts/products that are directly managed by a dedicated sales team.

This team negotiates with clients periodically (at least once a month) adjusting prices according to supply/demand of each product. Its main objective is to maximize sales by product for the stock available. Each of these negotiations must be approved by a team of Managers prior to its encoding in SAP.

The following issues were identified in the process:

• The sales team worked with spreadsheets which made it very difficult to maintain and consolidate.
• Communication between members of the sales team was inefficient (phone and email).
• The approval process was managed both through email and telephone.
• Reporting activities were costly because they did not have consolidated data.
• Coding in SAP the negotiations was 100% manual, so apart from the time wasted it caused coding errors. Consequently errors in customer orders and therefore rework.
• There was no visibility of the process in other departments / areas of the organization.

Customer Challenge

• Optimize the negotiation process, from the preparation of the negotiation to approval and subsequent encoding in SAP.
• Improve communication between members of the sales team.
• Exploit the data related with the process and with the negotiations through Reports and Data export functionalities.
• Automate encoding SAP negotiations.
• Provide transparency and visibility of the process to the organization.

Proposed Solution

After analyzing the customer’s problem and looking to reuse their technological resources, a solution was proposed based on mobile solution and BPM (Business Process Management).

Mobile solution development and APP optimized for iPAD that allows:

• Negotiate both Offline / Online with the customers.
• Automate customer notifications by sending emails with negotiations, details of the negotiations and keeping the customer informed when the negotiation is finally approved.
• Integrate within the APP all the information needed for the negotiating process, as data and market evolution, historical, comparative, etc...

• Have an instant messaging system built into the APP for sending / receiving messages broadcast to all members of the sales team.
• Implement the negotiation approval flow by the Managers.
• Keep devices synchronized with the central platform.
• Implement security mechanisms for managing devices and users.

Web Platform. The web system allows:

• Check the real-time status of each negotiation and prioritization.
• Provide a consolidated view of information at product and customer levels.
• Implement flows associated with each negotiation through BPM technology.
• Have a quick messaging system for sending / receiving messages broadcast to all members of the sales team.
• Provide reporting and data extraction tools from both the process and negotiated prices.
• Have a Backoffice tool to maintain information concerning Users, Accounts, Products and their relationships.

• Have an audit trail system that allows the tracking of each negotiation processes, process synchronization with mobile devices and interface with SAP.
• Manage activation/deactivation of mobile devices and users remotely from the Web Platform.
• Have a flexible security model that handles functional roles to allow access to the platform by other departments of the organization.
• Develop Interfaces to:
  • Synchronize with the APP or the central platform.
  • Integrate in SAP approved negotiations.

Next Steps

Following the successful implementation of the solution a new set of functionalities are going to be developed:

• Implement both the APP and the web platform, other negotiation processes and their associated business flows.
• Integrate into the APP information form, external flows needed by the Sales Team such data from the corporate CRM.
• Develop the new module in the APP for managing customer orders.