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"The automation of these processes has freed up two full-time employees who can now focus on more
customer-centric activities such as promotions and pricing"
Saji Oomen, Group IT Manager, Al Batha
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The Al Batha Group (Al Batha) is one of the biggest groups of companies in the United Arab Emirates. Member companies
specialise in a broad range of activities including manufacturing, engineering, distribution, construction, and printing.
When Al Batha started rolling SAP R/3 out across all 22 member companies in 2000, it identified several areas offering
significant scope for process improvements.
Mobile operations were one such window of opportunity. Field sales (or route accounting) activities were traditionally
performed manually. This was both time-consuming and error-prone, also involving a heavy downstream administrative burden.
The company decided to introduce the route accounting solution from Vxceed Technologies, RouteTrac, on Microsoft® SQL
Server™ 2000. Built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, RouteTrac empowers the sales team with comprehensive, up-to-date
customer, product, and pricing information. The .NET Framework is an integral component of Microsoft Window® that provides
a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications. Armed with data on a
customer's inventory, buying pattern, stock off-take, and credit-standing, mobile agents are able to make informed decisions
on the spot, close sales in the field and issue invoices directly from the handheld devices.
"Not only were our manual route accounting processes error-prone, they were extremely inefficient. In the past, it took between
two and three hours a week to key in the data from one mobile agent. The automation of these processes has freed up two
full-time employees who can now focus on more customer-centric activities such as promotions and pricing," explains Saji
Oommen, Group IT Manager at Al Batha Group.
Key to the success of the mobile project, however, was the ability to integrate RouteTrac with the backend SAP R/3 system. At
the end of each day, the mobile agents connect their handhelds to mobile docking stations located at the Al Batha sales offices
and warehouses. The data entered during the day is synchronised with the SAP R/3 system. Ensuring data integrity as information
flows bidirectionally between the SAP system and the handhelds was one of the biggest challenges for the project.
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