Atlas Copco Tools Central Europe uses DISTRICT to perform regular sales territory optimizations for its massive 540,000 km² sales area that spans five countries. The result: A marked increase in productivity!

Atlas Copco is a leading international provider of industrial productivity enhancement solutions. Its many products include air compressors, generators, construction and mining equipment, industrial tools and assembly robotics.

Atlas Copco’s sales area for industrial and assembly robotic tools encompasses Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium.

In short, our company’s areas of operation extend across multiple national boundaries, requiring us to keep careful track of our activities to ensure the cohesive management of sales territories.

Since 2000, DISTRICT has served as the instrument with which we have been successfully coordinating operations in our wide-ranging sales territories and performing numerous optimizations.

We have special analytic tools that allow us to calculate all the relevant basic sales data for the smallest regional units. We then import this data into DISTRICT and use it for further calculations and analyses. Numerous factors come into play each time we prepare to optimize our sales territories. These include not only demand levels, but also, crucially, the locations of our many customers, sales and service staff as well as street networks. DISTRICT 10’s inclusion of comprehensive Tele Atlas street maps as well as distance-calculating tools such as the isochron analysis help us bring our diverse markets into sharp focus. Thanks to DISTRICT, we’re easily able to determine and display the optimal customer assignment configurations for our staff members

Additional criteria that affect our sales territory structures are the locations of natural barriers (particularly with regard to the mountainous terrain in Switzerland and Austria) as well as the provision of customer service through our regional resellers.

Thanks to DISTRICT’s many included maps and extreme user-friendliness, we are able to create optimized territory structures for our 540,000 km² sales area within a couple of weeks, achieving a high level of transparency at every stage of the process.

The DISTRICT feature with which we are most impressed is the ability to aggregate any territory structure – such as postcode areas – into a new regional configuration at a mere click of the mouse. These kinds of aggregations – e.g. sales territories or sales regions – can be then be manually – and almost effortlessly – adapted and fine-tuned, while all of the associated data is automatically recalculated at each change. This means that after the official optimization phase, urgent changes to our operations or structures can be implemented and updated within minutes.

Because DISTRICT is also used by our sales directors, it’s possible for them to try out and prepare their own ideas for possible improvements in their area at any time by modifying an existing DISTRICT map or project. Later, when it´s time for the planning talks between all teams, it’s then a simple matter of comparing and evaluating these proposals. This, of course, accelerates and simplifies the process of coming up with and agreeing on better structures for our many sales territories.

In summary, DISTRICT has significantly simplified our planning process. Thanks to the increased transparency, we have also achieved a pronounced boost in productivity.

Author:

Mark Ebbinghaus
Business Intelligence Manager
Atlas Copco Tools Central Europe GmbH
Mark.Ebbinghaus(at)de.atlascopco.com