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The Hillman
Group is a "nuts and bolts" kind of company. Literally. It is a
$380 million distributor of fasteners, screws, washers and, yes, nuts
and bolts. They have 25,000 customers that range from Wal-Mart, Lowe’s,
Home Depot, True Value and Sears to the "mom and pop" hardware stores
that are the mainstay of small towns and rural centers. But with more
than 600 sales representatives scattered throughout the U.S., trying to
efficiently align sales territories is a challenge (figures 1 and 2).
Sticking pins in wall maps to see the locations of sales
representatives with respect to customers simply added up to too many
pins. The company needed a better solution.
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Figure
1 (Click for larger view)
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Figure
2 (Click for larger view)
Background
Hillman was not simply looking for a desktop mapping product. The
solution had to be coupled to its existing investment in its business
intelligence platform. In addition, the company was incurring
significant shipping costs from its distribution centers in order to
get products to customers. The company knew that tools were available
to better manage these costs by analyzing its location-based
information.
Currently, the company is using WebFOCUS from Information Builders to
provide a fill-rate report that is comprised of real-time order
processing, a daily revenue report and product margin information. Each
report summarizes the company-wide status, which may be subdivided by
individual warehouses.
Location Intelligence
The team of Pete Hebauf and Kirk Townsley of Hillman found that ESRI's
ArcGIS would integrate with the WebFOCUS platform through a Java
application programming interface. Hebauf and CIO Jim Honerkamp have
since identified approximately six Web-based reporting applications
that will significantly benefit from the integration. However, a main
concern is the ability to balance sales territories to improve customer
service. The process had been unscientific, using best guess logic to
assign territories to representatives. With ArcGIS, Hillman will look
to do the following:
- Use straight line distance calculations to
facilitate the assignment of sales representatives to customers based
on the home address of the representative.
- Optimize the representative’s daily route
and provide driving directions using third-party services from ESRI.
- Combine the mapping of customer locations
with route optimization to identify coverage gaps. This will enable
Hillman to proactively address these gaps, possibly adding
representatives or realigning territories as necessary (figure 3).
- Provide a macro-geographical view of the
sales and service regions with drill-down capability into real-time
customer level detail.
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Figure
3 (Click for larger view)
Other WebFOCUS applications that will leverage ArcGIS in the immediate
future include:
- Product Penetration - provide a
macro-geographic view of each sales region
layered with real-time
product performance data by customer.
- Distribution Optimization – Map the
distribution center locations and
shipping destinations with carrier
rate tables to identify inefficiencies for corrective action and
subsequent cost savings.
Speaking about the ability to visualize the
distribution of sales
representatives to its customers, Hebauf said, "We were never able to
see them all before."
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