Creta Farm, the biggest company in Greece in the production and processing of pork meat, chose PocketBiz Sales by SiEBEN to manage its sales process.

CRETA FARM is the biggest company in Greece in the production and processing of pork meat and one of the biggest in the production and processing of cold meat. CRETA FARM is vertically structured and fully controls the production, the processing and the trading of the products that it produces. The company owns an extended sales and distribution network that promotes and distributes Creta Farm products in the domestic market.

Company Profile
Creta Farm was founded 30 years ago and is based in Rethymno. Its line of business is the production, the processing and the trading of forages, fresh meat and other meat products. The company continuously invests in the research and development of new and innovative products. The sales network it owns is extended in the greater part of Greece, covering more than 5.000 active points of sale. The company aims at maintaining its growth, growing its market share, continuing to offer high quality products and penetrating the European market. The company has received many honorary awards.

Business Challenges
Creta Farm owns a modern ERP system that helps it fully control its business cycle and production process. Despite this the company faced serious problems with the order taking process performed by the company salesmen.
The salesmen needed background information for every customer and point of sale in order to negotiate their sales more effectively. Also, Creta Farm has special agreements with its most important customers to offer certain product and volume discounts. In many occasions the salesmen were not aware of the latest agreements which resulted to serious delivery errors. At the same time the salesmen needed to be updated about the available stock of each product in all of the company warehouses (Crete, Athens, Patra, Thessalonica and Larisa), in order to be able to inform the customers about availability and estimated delivery time. Another serious problem was the delivery delays. This problem was more intense for the most distant customers because the salesmen that visited them were unable to return to the central office every day to hand over the orders they had received. In addition to that, an entire day was needed to enter hand-written orders in the ERP. Creta Farm performed an extensive market research in order to gather information about the solutions available in the mobile market and choose the best one that would cover its requirements.

Solution
The answer to Creta Farm’s requirements was PocketBiz Sales by SiEBEN. Creta Farm selected and implemented the following modules of PocketBiz Sales: Order-entry, Customer Ledger Card, Money, Sales Statistics and X-Van. Also, specific custom solutions were developed to fulfill special requirements. While taking orders using PocketBiz Sales and when the salesman enters a product in the order, the last sale price to the particular customer is displayed. The most important technological innovation of PocketBiz Sales, which is the ability to synchronize data between salesmen and the company back-office information system in a way that in a few seconds information is exchanged both ways, helped Creta Farm dramatically reduce delivery times. Order dispatching and access to stock information for any product became easy to control. Finally the company IT department helped fully integrate PocketBiz Sales to the company ERP, so that data is exchanged both ways and dual entries are avoided.
QTEK 9090 were selected for PDA devices. QTEK 9090 have embodied GSM/GPRS and WLAN and were selected for the company salesmen. For the X-VAN users, Intermec 730 were selected as terminal devices and Intermec 6820 as portable printers.

Creta Farm Benefits
The benefits that Creta Farm enjoys after implementing PocketBiz Sales are quite astonishing. Sales department productivity (visits to customers) and customer orders grew dramatically. Also, the department expenses were reduced since management can now better control them with the help of PocketBiz, where all expenses are recorded in detail. The ordering process is fully automated, phone communication with the back-office has become obsolete and errors have almost been eliminated. Finally, real time reporting for management has been achieved. This was particularly advantageous in managing the salesmen that serve distant customers, since without PocketBiz Sales these salesmen had to return to the company to deliver their full sales report.
Customer service was another field that was significantly improved. Customers can now be aware of the exact delivery date of their order since the salesmen now have access to product availability and stock. Finally delivery errors have now been seriously reduced.

Why Creta Farm chose SiEBEN?
Creta Farm performed a market research regarding the market for mobile order taking solutions. Five companies were promoted and from them SiEBEN was selected since PocketBiz Sales was the only solution that could resolve seamlessly the issue of the distant communication of the salesmen. Moreover SiEBEN’s well qualified personnel offered reliable custom solutions to all special requirements that were raised.