example case study
Territory Manager has helped L'Oréal to streamline the process of managing territories, adapting existing territories dynamically to reflect changes in demand concentration, and creating new ones where required.
Arthur Ehoff, commercial development manager for L'Oréal Professional Products Division, points out:
"Our customers include a significant proportion of the 34,000 hair salons in Britain, and when you’re dealing with thousands of establishments, some of which are bound to be quite small, inevitably there’s a constant process of change.”
“Centres of interest vary over time. For instance, several new salons might spring up in quick succession in one area, while there might be a temporary decline in another.”
The re-districting functions within Territory Manager take care of the work, ensuring automatically that each territory contains a mix of establishments that meets all the criteria laid down by the company.
Territory Manager: balance territories using many criteria
Automated territory management
Territory Manager automatically creates territories, balancing many user-defined factors at once. The user can weight the importance of the different factors (e.g. equal numbers of customers vs. prospects) and can specify whether contiguous areas are needed, a certain number of areas are to be built, or that areas are centred around specified poles (e.g. locations of depots or engineer bases).
Plan sales territories, franchise areas, engineer territories etc
Territory Manager is extremely flexible and includes a range of dialogue boxes to lead you through the set-up process to ensure the automation takes into account the factors that are important to your business.
Determine the shape of your territories
Options include, for example, "Homogenous" - ideal if it is most important that "holes" or "islands" are avoided. In other circumstances it could be more important that each territory has the same area or that the distance to the centre of each territory is minimised.
Specify restrictions when building each area
In addition to the option to force Territory Manager to create territories centred around particular location or "poles", there are options to make territories nest into larger regions. For example you may wish to develop sales areas within your existing area management structure. Your company may traditionally treat areas like the Isle of Wight as separate territories or you might like to treat the ferries as a bridge and incorporate the island in whichever region contain Portsmouth and Southampton. Just specify whether or not Territory Manager should use bridges.
Use Scoring Methods to weight the importance of each factor
If ideally you would like 200 customers in each territory, you would like to centre the areas around existing engineer bases, you prefer the number of call-outs per month to be equal and would prefer not to have holes and islands. It is likely that it is not possible to meet all these criteria exactly in every territory. So Territory Manager enables you to use scoring methods, coefficients and optimisation values to weight the importance of each of your chosen factors.
The scoring in Territory Manager enables you to specify the capacity of each centre or "pole" and to specify detailed calculations on which territories should be balanced. For example, you may need to ensure every region has a combined total number of customers and prospects greater than a specified amount.
Coefficients enable you to weight your variables so it could be that the territories are balanced to enclose equal numbers of residential households and delivery volumes last year, but getting last year's volumes balanced fairly across territories is twice as important as the number of households.
