Toyo Tires USA’s business can be divided between OE sales to auto manufacturers and the replacement market. The former case is made up of large volume sales made at the highest level of the company; the latter by sales to retailers and distributors which are typically made by sales personnel. Toyo’s replacement tire business had a sales team of about 25 or 30 people.

Sales personnel at Toyo had a problem: lack of information. Data was plentiful – Toyo’s ERP system contained all manner of information about every transaction, every sale to every tire dealer and wholesaler. But the data was not easy to use.  First, it had to be pulled from an SAP system (which for historical but inexplicable reasons was set up to mimic AS/400). Then it needed to be manipulated into a format that provided actionable information. Additionally, they were required to generate reports on their performance for the VP of Sales every month.

Not all sales people had the skills to pull the data, much less to create the types of reports they needed in order to help them with both sales and the monthly reporting. One of the Sales Directors who was more adept than his subordinates made a practice of pulling the data himself and generating reports for each of the people in his team.

We were brought on to fix this problem, among several others. The tool we built automatically downloaded data from SAP, broke the data into regions corresponding with the territory of each sales person, and created a menu driven report for each member of the sales team.  That included a dashboard showing high level results, but because the report contained multiple menus, users could drill down to individual SKUs and customers, or aggregate groups of products and customers, as needed. Historical trends and pricing recommendations were also included.

Sales personnel found that the tool reduced the amount of time they needed to prepare for meeting with each customer. Additionally, since most of the data they needed for their monthly reports was being generated automatically, it eliminated much of a monthly task taking several hours a week. Equally importantly, the reports helped sales personnel to better focus on profitability, in some cases resulting in almost a double digit increase in profits.