Firm streamlines feedback system
By Asina Pornwasin
The Nation

In bid to improve its sales and marketing strategies, the Thai Asia Pacific Brewery, a manufacturer of Heineken, Tiger and Cheers, is launching its real-time mobile market-feedback system and push-mail system for its salesforce.

Thai Asia Pacific Brewery sales director Jaraspong Hutasingh said the company is planning to launch the new version of its mobile market-feedback system which will discard its offline form and be taken online and will be available in real time very soon. The move is aimed at helping the company respond to changes in the market faster.

In the existing system, in use  for five years, Heineken's 85-strong sales force carries two devices, a traditional PDA device and a mobile phone, while visiting the company's customers throughout the country.

Even though salespeople can key in information, such as volume shipment and promotional schemes, into the PDA, they cannot send this information to the company's system immediately.

The frequency of updates used to be about a month to a week, or at its fastest, at the end of the day.

However, this was dependent on the location of the sales personnel.

Apart from this, a huge amount of information added to the compexity. A salesperson would visit about 200 shops to collect market information. Thus, data from about 17,000 shops was collected.

In some areas, they were not able to send the data collected back to the office in time because the system required them to transfer the information from the PDA device to their laptops and connect to the Internet.

Responding to this, the company plans to roll out its online, real-time market-feedback report system and will be using the HTC Touch Cruise, a PDA phone, to replace the two devices.

The new system allows sales people to collect data from the field, throughout the country and to send it to the company's system immediately through the mobile phone's data network.

The company also plans to launch a push-mail application which will help improve sales-force management because the company can communicate with all its salespersons in real time without needing to wait for salesperson to connect to the Internet.