Two programming providers for RegioGraph – Business & Seele and Zim-Tec – developed a customized add-on for RegioGraph Planning for the manufacturer of heart surgery products. This add-on makes it possible to create multiple associations between territories and customer service relationships in foreign territories.

St. Jude Medical is a leading company in the development, production and sale of medical products for cardiology and heart surgery. The company was founded in 1976 in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA and currently employs approximately 10,000 staff members in more than 100 countries. Its product portfolio encompasses five product areas:

1. Implantable cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators (cardiac rhythm management)
2. Heart catheters for electrophysiology (atrial fibrillation)
3. Heart valves and ablation systems for cardiac surgery (cardiac surgery)
4. Products for interventional cardiology (cardiology)
5. Neurostimulators (neuro-modulation)

These five product areas also represent five sales areas, which presented a unique challenge: This complex, historically evolved sales structure consisted of five sales areas (silos) that operated in parallel; these sales areas needed to be depicted on a one-to-one basis and then optimized. The goal was to build a sales organization out of the five silos in which one of a total of three sales heads is responsible – at the customer level – for all sales areas in this clinic ("one roof " strategy).

Because individual customers (clinics, medical specialists) are partly served by a specialized sales force member on a sales area basis while, at the same time, a sales force member is partly responsible for multiple sales areas, it was not possible to break up the entire structure into multiple sub-projects. Also, associations could not always be depicted purely in relation to the corresponding territory, because often sales force members were responsible not just for their core areas, but also for individual customers outside of their normal sphere of responsibility.

In order to see the entire complex structure at a glance, it was necessary to simultaneously edit all customers and their assignments and make available special visualization and optimization tools. St. Jude Medical already adopted RegioGraph Planning in 2003 for the purpose of sales territory planning. To assist in carrying out the project, Mr. Johnen – head of sales in Germany – brought "Business & Seele" and "Zim-Tec" onboard – two longstanding partners of GfK GeoMarketing and suppliers of programming services for customizing the software. Together, these partners developed a new RegioGraph tool that met their specialized needs.

As a default, RegioGraph tables have a column for the staff's regional assignments. In this project, the number of these "Belongs to" columns was increased to five: This makes it possible for St. Jude Medical to carry out a combined planning procedure involving both territories and customers in foreign territories.

Johnen is very satisfied with the solution:
"Thanks to the RegioGraph add-on macro 'RegioGraph MultiPLAN`, we were able to automatically visualize our complex sales structure and can implement changes to the customer assignments across all sales areas at the press of a button. We can move individual customers or entire regions. The tool also gives us the option of illuminating our sales structure from different perspectives, such as those of customers and employees or that of a sales area.“

„All customers were associated with data indicating the product area of St. Jude Medical for which they might have use. Key accounts could be identified very quickly using visualization techniques such as pie charts. We also used RegioGraph to visualize turnover in comparison to sales potential on a customer-by-customer basis – this brought a high degree of efficiency to the analysis and sales planning process in the respective sales territories."

Other interested users can access the add-on macro for analyzing and pl anning multi-dimensional sales structures.
www.businessundseele.de und www.zim-tec.de.