Hisense, the well-known and widely recognised manufacturer of electronics and appliances, is the latest client to make use of the Onsight mobile sales suite by Cape Town-based software development company Maxxor. Little over a year since Onsight was released, its customer base has broadened significantly, and the Hisense case is a prime example of how this suite is constantly being updated to meet clients' bespoke needs.
Hisense is a multinational corporation with its origins and headquarters in China, and has been building a foundation in the South African market since 1996. In 2013, Hisense erected a large manufacturing factory in Atlantis, just outside Cape Town, which produces about 400 000 refrigerators and televisions per year. This makes it possible for Hisense to export products from South Africa, which it currently does to 10 neighbouring countries, including Zambia, Malawi and Botswana.
Its broad product range made Onsight's electronic product catalogue a comfortable fit for the Hisense sales team. However, Maxxor identified a more pressing issue that needed to be dealt with: the fact that Hisense collects data (including many thousands of photographs) from hundreds of reps who visit stores acrossSouth Africa to oversee product displays and merchandising, as well as to perform stock-taking.
Tiaan Esterhuyse, Retail Analyst for Hisense South Africa, explains the issues experienced with this data collection and merchandising process: "The sheer quantity of data collected by our reps each day became a time-consuming process to maintain. The data received was unstructured and therefore difficult to sort, filter and search through. On top of this, the constant copying, e-mailing and collation of data created potential for human error." Another issue that needed to be addressed was monitoring the activities of the reps. "Monitoring took up a lot of unnecessary time, and we had to manually match data with the reps that collected it."
In order to solve these issues for Hisense, Maxxor extended the core Onsight product suite by adding some innovative new features. Adrian Frielinghaus, Director of Product Development, explains: "The new features we created for Hisense include the scheduling of data collection activities by sales managers, reps receiving duties via the cloud and the uploading of data to Onsight servers in real-time." These newly added features brought with them immense time-saving benefits for the Hisense sales team.
Frielinghaus elaborates: "When completing an activity, reps can send confirmation to their managers through the app. At the same time, data received by the manager can immediately be filtered, sorted and searched using unique, preset categories. This real-time data configuration means that analysis can occur quicker, and new duties based on this speedy analysis can be assigned back to the reps within minutes.
"These new features will expand the Onsight mobile sales app functionality into automated merchandising and data collection services. In this way we can continue providing our clients with a time- and money-saving system that will simplify their sales processes. Many of our clients are already finding this addition beneficial. We hope to be adding even more great features to Onsight in the future."
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