Amann Girrbach AG is one of the leading dental technology companies, with locations in Germany, Austria, France, the USA and Asia. A particular challenge for the company's sales staff is the management of its various product channels. Amann Girrbach has been successfully meeting this challenge since 2005 through the use of RegioGraph and sales territory planning consultancy from GfK GeoMarketing. Interview with Jutta Girrbach, management at Amann Girrbach AG. 

How does your business work?

We are manufacturers of appliances and materials for the construction of dental prostheses. Amann Girrbach produces and exports its appliances worldwide under its own label and also produces products for other brand-name manufacturers in the dental industry. Our product portfolio has changed and expanded in recent years as a result of the transition to digital prosthetic processes. We provide direct distribution in Germany and Austria. Our customers are dental laboratories and dentists with laboratories in their offices.

How many sales distribution channels do you have, and how many sales employees?

Up to this point, we've been managing our operations in the German and Austrian market with a 28-person external sales force and an 8-person in-house staff. This is precisely what we wanted to change!

What was the specific problem you wanted to solve with RegioGraph?

It had been several years since we last carried out an evaluation with RegioGraph. Since that point, our market and company had undergone immense changes. Our sales regions had previously been divided into four territories. We suspected that these territories could be optimized in terms of their size as well as their customer and turnover potential. We also wanted to reduce these four territories to three territories. Due to the significant growth of our company, we wanted to increase the external sales force regions from 28 to 32 and allocate them among the new 3-territory structure.

How did you proceed and which criteria had to be taken into account? 

Although many of these changes were necessary and even desired, we wanted to make sure that we took into account our employees' places of residence as well as existing customer relationships. We therefore imported data on our existing customer base from our ERP system as well as external sales force assignments into RegioGraph. We also evaluated data on turnover, postcodes, customer classifications and many other criteria directly on the digital maps.

We then used RegioGraph to create an optimal territory structure and fairly distribute potential in a way that made the best use of our personnel resources. We simply had to indicate the most important parameters and then adjust some of the software's suggestions according to the unique characteristics of several regions.

Your final word on working with RegioGraph?

The coaching of our employees by GfK GeoMarketing sales territory planning experts was extremely helpful and allowed us to achieve the desired result in just a week-and-a-half! As a result of this positive experience, we feel good about the benefits that future adjustments to our structure will provide and are well equipped to achieve our growth targets thanks to RegioGraph.

Kontakt:

Jutta Girrbach 
management,Amann Girrbach AG 
germany(at)amanngirrbach.com 
www.amanngirrbach.com  

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