This year Campofrio Food Group received Microsoft Forum 2015 Digital Transformation Prize. Our IST and Sales Teams developed a new application for Spain’s and Portugal’s Sales Departments that has led CFG’s digital transformation. Take a look at the developers’ experience and insights regarding this great achievement!

Could you please provide us with some background about the situa-tion before the development of this solution? Which was the previous workflow and its related problems and limitations for the company?We had two different scenarios, Spain and Portugal. In Spain, we were using an application that was developed 10 years ago and met the needs of the market at its time. In black and whi-te, with no pictures, and no real-time incidence, this solution eventually no longer gave that extra that was de-

manded by the market and cried out for renewal. As of Portugal, we had a fully manual pro-cess at the time. Orders were taken through pen and paper and telephone, which transla-ted into slower processing and data analysis. After the evaluation of several alter-natives, Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM

was chosen by our team as the new application.

Could you give us a brief background about the team that developed the application?Regarding Spain, we had four main teams involved; an external consul-tancy team with mostly men and a

female manager, CFG’s Business Team with a mana-ger and 4 key users involved in the tes-ting of the appli-cation in its diffe-rent phases, CFG’s IST Team with a 21 year-old as our youngest member, and our Sales Su-pport Team that mo-nitored end to end transactions. Most of our team mem-bers for this project have been in the company between six and twelve years so far. In Portugal we had a multidis-ciplinary team of 8 people developing functions related to logistics, finance, and follow-up, with around 10 years in the company and an average age of 40 years old.

What about the solution develop-

ment process? How much time, when and for how long were you developing?We began with Spain in March 2014 with the analysis, develo-pment, and deci-

sion requirements of the project. We launched a pilot in Madrid and Barce-

«With this new solution, our sales and commercial teams have

taken an important evolutionary leap»

From left to right, Spain’s CFG team: Javier González Martínez, Sales Control & Telesales Manager; Rui Montero Novais, Application Services-Core Apps Manager; and Gonzalo Martínez Olea, Market, HR & Legal IST Director.

«This step towards full digitalization sums up the effort and commitment of the many teams involved»

Interview with the Award Winning IST and Sales Teams of Campofrio Food Group

lona during November 2014 and the final deployment happened during Q1 2015, where 198 members of the sales team started working with our application. Portugal’s development took around 4-5 months since it was mostly based on Spain’s launching. We had a total of 24 salesmen running through an adaptation process that ran really smoothly.

What does win-ning this prize mean to you? How does this award encoura-ge you when it comes to deve-loping a new ver-sion of the appli-cation?With this new solution, our commer-cial teams have taken an important evolutionary leap. This prize definite-ly encourages us to develop further versions of the application. We are currently developing new versions of the application in which more func-tions are being studied such as the inclusion of telesales under the same Dynamics platform to continue with a broader integration of our systems. We have modifications that have always been in our development road map and we also hold an experts’ committee that evaluates our sales teams’ suggestions and proposals.

What kind of skills or knowledge did the end user (Sales Team) have to de-velop in order to manage themselves efficiently with the application? Has it been a difficult process? Has there been any training to teach the appli-cation’s usage and functionality?Fortunately, we had a really fast and smooth process of adaptation due to the level of commitment of tho-se involved and the high similarities between the previous tool and this new application. As the team mana-gers became super users, they were able to transmit their knowledge to the rest of their team members very efficiently and with very few mis-takes. High quality manuals and one-day trainings with practical cases and duties were given to our Sales Teams and even though the biggest difficulties we encountered during the process were those related to sy-nchronization and some initial flaws, these did not prevent successful im-plementation.

What impact did this application

have in the Commercial and Logis-tics Departments?Handling more than one million or-ders per year, this application has brought benefits in three main pillars:Efficiency and productivity: Enabling partial synchronization has accelera-

ted the processes and has allowed for larger reaction times, resulting in further substitu-tion of products that are out of stock at the mo-ment. Nowadays our Logistics Department re-ceives orders in real-time allowing for the workload distribution over a longer period of time.

Evolution: The time needed to trans-mit information has been reduced from 10-15 minutes to 10-15 seconds, saving enough battery for the rest of the day. Time ma-nagement: Life quality of our sales team has been im-proved sin-ce they are now able to accompl i -sh most of their tasks and data synchroni-zation on real time.

Could you tell us about some day to day e x a m p l e s about pro-cesses that have beco-me more efficient?Apart from reducing data synchronization times, nowadays our salesmen have real-ti-me access to a Sales Activation Fund through which they are able to iden-tify the resources that they are either generating or spending depending if they are selling above or below the previously established reference pri-ces.

Has this new solution allowed you to monitor CFG’s best sellers and to

learn some best practices to apply in the company as a standard?Our Sales Team invests less time on the application than before and so far we believe it is definitely a good sign. Although we are still studying the di-rect impact of this new application in relation to best sellers and best prac-tices, we believe that in a few months we will certainly have a better perspec-tive of this.

What kind of analytics can now be extracted with Dynamics CRM? What improvements have there been compared to those that exis-ted previously?We hold a robust central system that separates and prepares information to every salesman each night. Nowa-days this allows for fast and efficient detection and monitoring of inci-dences that provides sales persons more time for reaction and day to day planning.Since this is still a recent development, we are still looking forward to develo-ping future strategic applications of the

r e t r i e v e d data. We are about to launch our Power BI [Business Intelligence] project in Spain, which will provide a clear visibi-lity of the re-trieved data in a dash-board and we certainly believe this will be a huge step towards the d e v e l o p -ment of new strategies throughout the com-pany.

What are the next

steps that will follow? Are there any new features planned, new countries for its implementation?We intend to launch the Release 2 ver-sion of this app in a few weeks in Spain. Since it includes geopositioning, it will allow the Sales Teams to have their members and customers localized. Between July and September, we also expect to launch our Telesales Project in which we will have all of Spain’s Sales Team working in the same platform.

«Fortunately we had a really fast and smooth process of adaptation

due to the level of commitment of those involved and the high

similarities between the previous tool and this

new application»

Paulo Rosa, Senior Manager Field & PL in Portugal.