Sales Territory Management

The Challenge:  After going live with SAP Smith & Nephew had to find solutions for application functionality that was not covered by the standard SAP modules. One of these areas of deficiency for Smith & Nephew was sales compensation. To solve the problem they created some tables and input screens to manually manage the territory alignments for sales compensation. As the sales force grew this became a more cumbersome job.

The Solution:  Vanick Group came in to evaluate the problem and consult Smith and Nephew on the possible solutions. After investigating the business rules, the application needs, who the users were and how they would be accessing the system, Vanick was able to recommend a solution. The most logical solution was to create new application code in SAP to fill in the gaps. All of the users of the functionality were SAP users and the data being manipulated and stored was to support the compensation on sales that were being created and managed in SAP. Vanick Group thoroughly evaluated the business process and designed a new data model that emulated the way that Smith & Nephew was using the data. The new data model was much more flexible than the previous model and would easily allow for growth and more granular definition of the territories. Vanick then defined business rules for how the data would be created and managed. The last step was to create a simple graphical user interface that would allow sales administrators to quickly manage territory assignments, reassignments, and creation. Vanick also created a report to show where the gaps in assignments were and built business rules to prohibit overlap in assignment.

The Benefits: The result of the project was a more efficient and powerful territory management application. Smith & Nephew is anticipating significant growth in Sales employees in the next couple of years. This new application will allow them to quickly and easily add new sales staff and define new territories without adding new FTE’s to manage the process. When asked about the benefits of the new system, Rita Brock responded: “We have increased our productivity greatly. At the beginning of 2006 we had the pleasure of putting the new process to the test. If we had not had it, the task of having to split our Trauma and Recon product lines for all sales reps would have possibly taken most of the 1st quarter. With this tool, we were able to have most territories established within the first couple of weeks of the new year.” According to Lauren Wincates of Smith Nephew, “The Vanick solution has drastically reduced our hands-on time for aligning sales force territories. What used to be an extremely laborious process is now quick and streamlined, down to the point-and-click capabilities and easy-to-use mass change options.”