Simba, SA`s largest snack food company and a subsidiary of the world`s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo International, has expanded the traditional use of FrontRange Solutions` services management solution, HEAT, from management of IT into business disciplines as diverse as consumer relations, fleet management and sales and distribution.
Simba chose HEAT because of its IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) compliance, pricing, flexibility, local support and advanced reporting capabilities.
Says Simba IT business analyst, Walter Groenewald: "Initially, we acquired HEAT to help us log calls in our consumer services call centre, which deals with consumer complaints and compliments as well as enquiries about the company and its products.
"Specifically, we needed to track complaints in order to address situations like packaging, content and factory faults.
"Because HEAT enables us to break complaints down into categories, we can easily and accurately identify trends. These are then used by our supply chain to refine processes and standards - from sourcing of raw materials to manufacturing and distribution.
"We hadn`t intended using HEAT elsewhere in the organisation, but FrontRange reminded us that it is adaptable to just about any business environment. So, when we developed an urgent need in our IT call centre to manage our service level agreements, HEAT was the obvious solution.
"HEAT is used for incident, problem, development, change management and IT administration tasks. But its flexibility has also enabled us to add a call ticket scheduler that triggers people to do regular maintenance tasks.
"The data resident in HEAT provides management with the kind of accurate and relevant information crucial to decision-making and aids in identifying the causes of recurrent problems."
Based on the significant cost-savings and efficiencies HEAT had already demonstrated, Simba then implemented it in its fleet management call centre - to improve management of accidents, breakdowns, incidents, fuel account applications, vehicle transfers, minor technical repairs and maintenance for the company`s hundreds of delivery trucks.
HEAT is also used as a workflow tool for insurance claims - applying business rules via call tickets to ensure that accident reports, police case numbers and claims are submitted within a given period.
Simba plans to integrate HEAT with its handheld technology - enabling information from routine vehicle checks to trigger call tickets for maintenance or repairs.
In addition, HEAT has been implemented in the pre-sell call centre, enabling the imposition of business rules on Simba`s field marketers and forcing accurate data capture regarding orders, stock draws, promotions and rate of sales. "It therefore acts as a recorder of key performance indicators for our field marketers, as well as supplying us with a level of customer information and analysis we`ve not had before," Groenewald says.
"And because all the information is fully integrated with our sales and distribution systems, the entire company is able to respond more intelligently to the market."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) managing director, Tracey Newman, says HEAT`s focus on issue management sets it apart as a productivity enhancement tool. "If you unravel an issue, you`ll always find a log-jammed process. And processes have a generic structure. There`s always a beginning, a middle and an end that can be clearly defined. There are always specific steps that should be taken in a particular order to get most efficiently from the beginning to the end. And that sort of activity lends itself to automation - which is what IT does so well.
"What we`ve done with HEAT is exploit that capability in the most intelligent, logical, business-savvy way."
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