Samsung Germany and its field force are responsible for over 8000 POS-locations, which are to be visited regularly and simultaneously on a task-by-task basis. To connect such a vast store-network, not only time-efficient, but also target-oriented route creation is necessary. SmartWays delivers those routes to the Samsung fleet force every day.
Everyday objectives overlap: recurring store visits, product rollouts, nationwide promotion campaigns - all prioritized differently but important in their own way. Concurrently, drivers call-in sick, positions get vacant, or issues in the supply chain occur. The more complex an operation like the Samsung Field Force becomes, the less it can cope with avoiding AI-driven tour optimization.
Without tour optimization, drivers had to plan their journeys manually or locally with simple planning tools, which kept homeworking times at a high. Every change in terms of driver objectives lead to a time-consuming process, to coordinate and track dozens of drivers all over Germany. Supervisors had to be closely in contact with all their assigned drivers about every single detail.
SmartWays helps to efficiently coordinate and arrange all those tasks every day simultaneously. It uses non-centralized planning processes and implements an AI-driven automated solution. That way, high manual work can be drastically reduced as well as human error. Additionally, the mapping tools reshaped how driver service regions were assigned, tasks fairly deployed, and new drivers recruted.
Without SmartWays, each driver visited on average 2.5 POS per day. Even with basic tour optimization solutions, back-office time consumption was enormous. Communicating and updating objectives in spreadsheets and project management services, converting them into other spreadsheets for the tour optimization service, and finally keeping track of all fulfilled tasks.
The introduction of SmartWays tour planning did not only double the amount of POS visits for Samsung, but also reduced the back-office time by more than 70%. At the same time, reaction speed for ad-hoc tasks and fulfillment pace of special to-dos, such as rollouts of brand-new Samsung devices, increased heavily.
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