Increased productivity and enhanced customer relations as Riviana Foods goes mobile!

Background

Established in the 1950’s, Riviana Foods is one of Australia's largest and most successful food importers. The company is committed to continually developing new and innovative food products and has built an impressive portfolio of brands within the grocery business that collectively represent over 500 products. Additionally, the company boasts a strong presence in the Foodservice sector with key brands such as Riviana, Menu Master, Garden Supreme and Ocean Supreme.

The majority of the organization’s 165 employees are based at their Melbourne administrative and manufacturing headquarters, with sales and distribution facilities located throughout Australia.

Challenge

Since their establishment over 60 years ago, Riviana Foods had developed a number of homegrown RPG applications for data entry and warehousing, in particular investing significant resources in developing and refining their customer and order entry system. These applications had traditionally been limited to desktop access, which restricted the field sales team’s access to product information. It also meant that sales reps were required to spend significant time entering orders, which reduced their revenue-generating capacity. Finally, the lack of access to customer records and inventory impacted the company’s ability to hit order fulfillment targets. Mark MacGibbon, Computer Services Manager at Riviana, commented “Our sales team identified an opportunity to spend more time in front of customers if we could deliver mobile access to the system. We felt that the potential increase in revenue was a compelling reason to explore the opportunity.”

Riviana recognized that the lack of mobile access to the system was impacting their reputation as a progressive organization – they represented many major brands, but without the necessary tools to access key information the sales team were unable to provide a superior level of service to compliment their first-class products. Mark continued “As the industry leader, real-time access would give us the opportunity to set ourselves further apart from our competitors by providing a much improved purchase experience. If we could identify a simple, cost-effective way to do this, our reputation would be enhanced, along with our bottom line.”

Solution

Having already implemented a graphical interface with the newlook tool, Riviana were aware of looksoftware’s multi-channel philosophy and decided to use the lookserver tool to extend system access. They worked with the looksoftware product team to design and develop an optimized iPad version of the application that delivered real-time mobile system access to the sales team.

Whilst this resolved a number of the identified issues, it was necessary to integrate this system with various other desktop applications and product collaterals in order to provide a bespoke sales tool for the team. This integrated tool was then presented in HTML by lookserver, and accessible to each sales rep via a password-protected URL. This integration was one of the most important criteria for Mark during the planning and selection process: “A key requirement for the sales team was that they had everything available to them in one unified application. Whilst presenting to customers, it would be inconvenient and awkward to fumble around between different windows and sessions, and would impact their tried and tested sales process. We needed a tool that would support our existing process, rather than requiring us to change the process altogether.”

The optimized interface was designed to be intuitive and easy to navigate, providing anytime, anywhere access to back-end applications. looksoftware’s dynamic rules-based architecture created the UI on-the-fly, eliminating the need to rewrite RPG code or maintain two sets of code and enabling the system to be rolled out in just a few weeks. After some basic on-site training from looksoftware, the sales team was able to take immediate advantage of their remote system access and enhanced sales tools. Mark noted “The early feedback has been incredibly positive, with many of the sales team commenting that customer relationships have benefitted from the simple availability of better information. We anticipate a positive impact on revenues in the longer term, however the project has already proved its worth in the appreciation of our customers.”

Benefits

By providing mobile access to backend applications, product brochures, email and the internet, Riviana have seen significant improvements in the efficiency of the sales team. Having eliminated the time-consuming, multi-step process previously required to access this information, they have streamlined the sales process and enabled reps to enhance the time spent with customers.

The ability to reuse existing RPG code and implement a complete, integrated solution on-the-fly with looksoftware’s dynamic architecture also represents a considerable cost saving for Riviana. Alternative solutions would have required additional code to be written, adding significant man-hours and substantial time delays to the project implementation.

Finally, the Riviana team now presents an impressive sales and ordering system to the customer on state of the art technology, enhancing their reputation as an industry leader. Mark concluded “Thanks to looksoftware’s multi-channel approach, we have been able to implement a system that greatly increases our sales team’s capacity. Whilst the iPads are only one element of our sales support systems, they are visual proof to our customers of our commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. These are values we share with looksoftware, and we are happy and excited to partner with them going forward.”