“3 tablespoons of Coffee Grounds added with a tablespoon of any natural oil, and a tablespoon of brown sugar acts as an amazing body scrub that exfoliates your skin naturally. It is an inexpensive and effective way!” Right! It is that! This was the very first tip from an article that had tapped Ron’s undivided attention and had given birth to an ingenious idea of a home-grown business based on coffee grounds. Ron had always been an indulgent coffee lover and enjoyed creating his coffees with coffee beans. Sure, his dad had laughed at his business plan of creating useful products out of coffee grounds but his mom and his sister had been his constant support, ally, and aid.
Tucker’s Caffeine and Co. had grown up to be a mid-sized business with an annual revenue of just over $50 million and had expanded to multiple states within the country. Ron’s dad had finally started taking him seriously when his company profile had expanded from Coffee Scrubs to coffee candles, hair care products, garden composts, deodorizers, etc. Everything was about coffee grounds and of course, Ron’s appetite for coffee could not pump the ever-growing company. Based on an improved business model, Ron had started collecting his raw material from local cafés, restaurants, coffee companies, labs, factories, etc. He had a well-trained unit of field reps that took rounds every day, locally to collect the coffee grounds.
The field reps, though highly skilled, time management was not their USP. They often skipped certain collection points, traveled randomly, or reached late for grounds collection. This affected the daily collection, the quality of the collected grounds, and the company’s relationship with the raw material providers. In a way, though sustainable, it wasn’t a conventional way of raw material collection and required precision and discipline.
Ron had finally switched to Maplytics, a 5-star rated, popular App on the Microsoft AppSource for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM on the recommendation of his sister, his business consultant. Maplytics had seamlessly integrated his CRM Records with map and made visualizing his client, raw material suppliers, leads, competitors, points of sale, etc. on the map, easy. Maplytics had empowered Tucker’s Caffeine and Co’s decision-making with its ability to create balanced sales territories, plot optimized travel routes for its reps, search clients within proximity of the current position, and a lot more. However, the feature that Ron used the most to the point of overusing was Auto Scheduling. His managers had enlisted all his field and sales reps within the app and would efficiently plot a daily/ weekly schedule for them. The reps could refer it along with the managers and be aware of the number of appointments, time of each, duration of all, end time, travel routes, driving directions, travel time, etc. Using the app, Ron could overlook all the plans and know the work progression himself.
Reminiscing on the use of Automated Appointment Planning, Ron flicked through a few screens on his laptop to check the plans of the field reps reporting to one of his units. Missy Lawrence and Brian Langdon were planned for that day.
Missy’s schedule for the day started at 8 AM and ended at noon. She had 3 visits planned for the collection and a route along the points was plotted. He could see the points of travel, the distance of travel, and the time taken for each.
Brian’s schedule for the day was marked in a pink color legend.
He too had 3 collections for the day in a region different than Missy. Ron then moved on to check Missy’s calendar for an entire week.
He noticed her week was packed up with 3-5 collections per day. Ron spent some time examining the trips planned and the suppliers she was visiting. He clicked on one of the slots in her trip summary and noticed that an optimized route was planned for her. The end-to-end navigation directions were taking her to her destination supplier within 21 minutes.
The week looked optimally planned for Brian as well.
Ron discovered easy navigation through the week using the Calendar Navigation Buttons.
The laurel in the hat was the ability to be able to plan activities within the CRM for all the field reps.
Like Ron, there are several small and medium-scale business owners whose businesses are growing each day with Maplytics to ease the operations for the Field Sales and Field Service reps. Multiple large-scale enterprises across industries have also made Maplytics an integral part of their business model.
To explore more of Maplytics, you can always download a free trial from our website or Microsoft AppSource. For further details, you can hop on to our Blogs, Client Testimonials, Success Stories, and Video Library, or simply mail us at crm@inogic.com for a personalized free Demo or other mapping needs.
Until then,
Happy Planning!
