Charisma improves the essential activities and ensures the ease of use
We conducted a market research and Charisma proved to be the most viable and best known solution on the market. Its friendlyinterface is a real advantage for a higher adoption rate of the system, including the warehouse management.
Company
La Fântâna is the leader on the Romanian market operating in the field of natural water distribution and bottling via water cooler devices for both companies and residential environment. Currently, La Fântâna group has 600 employees in Romania and Serbia. It holds two bottling units in Romania, one in Bucharest and the other in Tălmaciu and a bottling unit located in Mitrovo Polje, Serbia.
In Romania, the company serves 25.000 clients, companies and institutions, plus a multitude of clients in the residential environment and owns 55.000 installed water cooler devices. . La Fântâna holds a national distribution network integrating 29 branches in the country’s largest cities and a fleet of over 100 cars.
With over 10 years of experience, the company was established in early 2000, when the entrepreneur Cristian Amza and two other investors founded Aqua Natural.
Challenge
The year 2003 was an important moment in La Fântâna’s development, a major investment to increase the production facilities, the vehicle fleet as well as to implement the ERP and CRM systems.
With a growing national distribution network, La Fântâna was looking for an integrated management solution to organize this activity uniformly, based on performance criteria, by correlating the orders and the inventory, deliveries and distribution routes in a single flow.
The new system had to merge the activity of the branches in a single database, available in real time, and to remove the impediments generated by the multiple operations that had to be centralized on a weekly basis. Moreover, the activity’s decentralization had a negative impact, in terms of financial activity inclusively. The company was not able to track the unpaid invoices efficiently because of the lack of reports and the one-week delay generated by the data centralization activity.
As the company was growing, it was harder and harder for the call-centre team to take over the orders. From the phone call to delivery, the order’s work flow was very long, involving a redundant effort of introducing data in various software systems. With over 10.000 customers, La Fântâna had in 2003, the call centre team was overloaded and the situation could get out of hand.
Solution
“We conducted a market research and Charisma proved to be the most viable and best known solution on the market. Its friendlyinterface is a real advantage for a higher adoption rate of the system, including the warehouse management.” Monica Matei, Audit&Contract Manager, La Fântâna.
The implementation of Charisma ERP meant unifying the management of the branches in a unique system which involved database cleaning, data and company processes standardization. Briefly, this represented the reorganization of the activity in each branch and at company level.
The activity of the branches was integrated in several steps, starting with the financial-accounting activity, inventory and contract management and continuing with predefined reports enabling financial analyses from different perspectives.
The ranking continued with the distribution activity. Charisma ERP was integrated with the routing activity used by La Fântâna , allowing to arrange the routes as route sheets that along with delivery notes and invoices stand for the set of documents that the drivers need to accomplish the delivery
A mobile management module was developed to protect the delivery and inventory and to allow the drivers to have their own inventory. After the driver delivers the goods and brings the documents to the financial department, the inventory is completed. The advantage of this activity is that the company can check the car’s inventory at any moment.
La Fântâna’s activity involves a large number of transaction, orders launched in call centres, interventions etc. This situation required various applications to automate certain activity areas in order to streamline them. Such a solution was CRM on web which, integrated with Charisma, automates the flow of the water orders and supports the call centre team. In order to track the phone calls and to remove the waiting period and errors, Mediatel service was also integrated. The CRM solution has also an interface for customers that enables to send the orders on web, to access the history of orders, complains and invoices.
Results
• A real-time and global view of orders, stocks and deliveries was achieved after unifying the branches’ activity into a single database. Thus, performance reports assessing areas, branches, agents, etc. could be conducted.
• The correlation between sales and encashment related to each client allowed a much better tracking of the collection activity and had impact on the financial activity. Thus, the predictability of cash could be established.
• The integration of Charisma with the routing application streamlines the drivers’ activity. “The orders are taken until 5 pm, systematized by the routing application and the process closes when Charisma generates the delivery documents, so the drivers can start their courses at the first hour”.
• The CRM on web solution automated the taking orders process. For instance, if a client has previously contacted the call centre, the system identifies the number and opens a window with the client’s data, thus, the searching time is eliminated and the orders are more easily taken over. Within a few minutes, the order gets to Charisma. “This functionality allows us to reduce the duration of a call and by default, the time allocated to register the orders, increasing thus the customer satisfaction.”
• Moreover, each client’s behaviour (complains, device change requests, interventions etc.) is introduced in web CRM and then transferred to the department able to solve them. The entire history of these actions is kept in the database and can be accessed anytime.
• Briefly, the benefits are cost reduction, activity planning, production tracking and an effective distribution and logistics activity.
Case study revised in 2012.