L’Oréal is the world’s leading cosmetic, skin care and haircare company. In New Zealand, the company employs 180 staff members including nationwide sales representatives, working to create a strong brand presence in hair salons, pharmacies, department & variety stores and grocery outlets throughout New Zealand.

In 2004, L’Oréal New Zealand still operated a manual order taking system, whereby sales representatives visited clients during the day, and took sales orders by manually filling in paper based forms. These were then faxed through to L’Oréal’s Client Services team each evening for processing. This slowed up fulfilment and led to inaccuracies. It also meant staff worked longer hours, which increased labour costs, and made information access a problem. Out-of-stock items were reported on a weekly basis to sales representatives which meant that orders were being taken for stock that was not available.

L’Oréal New Zealand had a very clear objective: to automate its sales processes, reduce delivery times, and improve order efficiency. The company chose Gen-i’s Sales Force Automation solution to progress them to a real-time mobile wireless ordering system.

Gen-i’s Sales Force Automation solution is an application hosted by Gen-i to equip mobile sales people with a powerful sales tool. It enables L’Oréal’s sales representatives to log into their Tablet PC and access the sales and product information they require. It means that while they are onsite, the sales representative can see their product catalogue, including detailed product information, customer specific pricing, stock levels and promotional items. A specifically developed Orderpad view allows orders to be taken literally as the buyer speaks.  Payment and credit details, previous and repeat orders, as well as track and trace information are all available to sales representatives there and then.

The easy adoption of Gen-i’s Sales Force Automation solution by L’Oréal’s sales representatives was imperative, so Gen-i and L’Oréal worked together to create the training material and user guides for the training sessions which were carried out on an ongoing basis throughout the project.

Feedback was positive, with sales representatives finding that this new technology made their jobs faster and easier and removed the pressure to process orders at the end of the day.
In particular, the company saw a dramatic reduction in the time taken by the sales representatives to process orders. Preparing 98 percent of orders with the customer removed the need to prepare and fax orders each night. This in turn reduced errors caused by double entry and removed the problem of fax bottlenecks.