Sales & Marketing Interests

Taking the Headaches Out of Distribution at Scholl International

Scholl International (ANZ) Pty. Ltd., the Australian and New Zealand subsidiary of Scholl International Pty. Ltd., is using DI Solution to track large amounts of dynamic product sales data on a more timely basis. Their British-held parent company, with revenues of approximately 170-million, is the leading international distributor of healthcare, beauty, and personal care products. Scholl International originally established its reputation as the world leader in footcare products. The consistently high quality of their products enabled the company to build and maintain a strong distribution network encompassing pharmacies, supermarkets, department stores, and other major retail channels. Scholl later capitalized on its successes and expanded its operations by offering this well-established distribution network to other manufacturers of quality health and beauty products. Today the company markets and distributes hundreds of quality products all over the world.

To maintain their competitive edge in the distribution of leading brand health and beauty products, Scholl ANZ needed to upgrade the quality of their sales reporting and analysis systems. "The nature of our business is very complex", explains John Field, Operations Director. "On a daily basis, we have to measure and track numerous critical sales figures including unit and dollar sales, the cost of sales expenditures, and rebate accruances and amounts owed to our 5000+ customers. It is also time-critical that we see the effect of our sales team's discretionary discount powers on our gross margin by account and by product, so as to accurately analyze all trading terms which impact overall sales and profitability. Prior to using DI Solution, we were experiencing a two-week waiting period after end-of-month for complete data processing and production of hard copy reports for analysis. That was just not good enough in this ultra-competitive marketplace in which we play."

Instigating the use of DI Solution has not only markedly improved the quality of Scholl's data, but also allows them to proactively assess their discount, rebate, and trading terms factors. Both improvements are key to the company in their efforts to maintain approximately $25-30 million worth of business in this area. Scholl ANZ chose DI Solution over other solutions because it afforded them the flexibility they needed to look at complex data from many angles. "One of our major requirements was that the system be very simple to set up and easy to customize, requiring very little technical or IS skills," says Field. "DI Solution has given us a total sales analysis solution that more than meets our requirements. Now, not only can we process the sales data on a daily basis, but our users and decision-makers are able to access and analyze it on-line almost immediately. We are able to analyze our customers' buying patterns with speed and flexibility we never dreamed of."

Scholl's financial and sales data is held in a highly specific CBA/ Dataflex database environment. Data is downloaded daily, weekly, and monthly to a DI Solution Builder residing on a Novell server. Users access the Models via DI-Divers running on Windows.

Future plans are under way to expand the use of DI Solution into other areas of the business, specifically in Forecasting, General Ledger, Bill of Materials, and Accounts Receivable. "We envision DI Solution eventually being our standard query tool into all the databases we have, thereby providing a standard environment across all levels of the company " says Field.