Case Study: Retail Services
Anderson Merchandisers Use Forecasting and Quoting Tools to Accelerate Service Configuration
75% Time Saved in Quoting Process | Real-Time Reporting on Revenue and Labor Forecasting Implemented
The Client
Anderson Merchandisers is a retail service provider who stocks, organizes, and completes other tasks within retailer stores for a variety of clients. As a Walmart Preferred Service Provider, manufacturers and distributors around the world entrust Anderson Merchandisers with promoting their consumer goods on Walmart shelves and enhancing the customer retail experience.
The Challenge
With responsibility for stocking Walmart stores all over the country and thousands of employees to coordinate, Anderson Merchandisers was looking for a system that could help keep their business process organized and forecast their staffing needs as they scale. The Salesforce CRM provided a cloud-based solution to organize their data, but Anderson needed a deeper level of customization to account for their unique, service-based opportunities that often involved multiple clients.
The Solution
Taking into account Anderson Merchandisers’ unique business processes, Rosetree Solutions designed a custom application tailored to the user experience within Salesforce. The first step is an interface that allows for logging and customization of service opportunities. These opportunities require a multitude of variable inputs with several dependencies. With this easy-to-use guided process, users can consistently, efficiently, and accurately price services.
The forecasting section allows Anderson Merchandisers to automatically calculate the number of people and hours of labor required for the services scheduled, as well as expected revenue. The company can now be better prepared for upcoming staffing needs and scheduling opportunities.
The final section is a quoting application for the services Anderson is providing. Since many of these services include placing products from multiple clients, a service can be broken up by percentages and then sent out with an auto-generated contract via DocuSign integration. Once the opportunity is closed, the data is moved into a proprietary ERP system Anderson has for further resource scheduling.
The Results
Anderson Merchandisers’ business process was streamlined and organized through a custom application in Salesforce. Additionally, a custom Salesforce dashboard offers high-level data visualizations to monitor the status of opportunities and forecast labor, providing insight into day to day activities and operations as a whole. Where much of this information was previously handled in spreadsheets or with manual calculation, now automation and a custom user interface make the services easy to organize, quote, and deliver in the store, all in less time and with less error.
