Viva International Group

The Viva International Group is a designer, distributor and manufacturer of branded eyewear and sun glasses. Since its establishment thirty years ago, it has emerged as a market leader in both sectors, in the United States and throughout the World, selling brands such as Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, Gant, Candies, Harley Davidson, Catherine Deneuve, Bongo, and many more.

Viva has two hundred sales reps across the US, managed by twelve regional sales managers. It also employs an office based telesales team. Whilst many of their customers’ repeat orders can be taken by the telesales team, the very nature of the product dictates that most sales are driven by the ‘look and feel’ of the products, with customers being eager to try on the eyewear before they order it.

To help the reps secure sales Viva also run a range of different sales promotions, offering customers different payment terms and breaks depending on the value of the orders taken.

How did Viva work & what in-efficiencies were there?

Before the implementation of MiniSell, Viva’s reps carried customer account cards and used paper order forms. Once completed, the order forms were faxed back to head office to be keyed into the company’s AS400 sales order processing system.

Entering the orders manually was a time-consuming process and also increased the chance of errors being made. What’s more, because the reps could not check the availability of stock items, customers often had to wait for back orders to be fulfilled. Both these factors had the potential to delay orders.

Although a number of the reps did have access to the AS400 system, it was not always practical to check this when they were face to face with the customer. This meant that the reps often had to phone head office in order to check customer and stock details.


What did Viva hope to achieve by implementing SFA?

With the implementation of a mobile sales force automation solution Viva hoped to achieve a number of objectives. These included reducing order fulfilment times, increasing sales by providing their reps with accurate stock information and enhancing customer service by giving their reps up to date account information. In addition to this, Viva also wanted to improve the level of communication between the reps and their head office.

How did Viva implement the project?

Following an extensive review, involving a number of different suppliers, Viva choose to use MiniSell alongside Lotus Notes mobile messaging facilitated by Good Communications, which would provide the reps with email and calendar too.

Because of the scale of the project, Viva decided to trial MiniSell with twenty five of its sales reps before rolling it out to the rest of the sales force. During this phase, Viva was able to evaluate MiniSell and decide which Pocket PC devices would be best suited to their reps. They were also able to work with Aspin’s MiniSell development team to adapt the software to meet the needs of their sales process.

After the success of the trial held during 2006, Viva implemented MiniSell across their entire US sales force throughout the course of 2007, choosing to equip the reps with HTC TyTN smart phone devices.

How MiniSell works on the handheld

MiniSell enables Viva’s reps to take orders, add additional customer contact details and schedule appointments. It also provides the reps with an easy-to-use product browser that enables them to access detailed and accurate stock information.

When a rep takes an order, MiniSell displays any promotions that apply to the selected customer and, if a promotion is selected, limits the available products for the order to those on the promotion. MiniSell also notifies the rep if they have not included or selected any details which are required to complete the order.

Once the order has been closed, and its total value has been calculated, MiniSell verifies whether the customer has ordered a high enough quantity or value of items to qualify for the selected terms. With these checks in place MiniSell reduces the likelihood of the rep making errors when taking an order, allowing to them to focus on selling rather than taking the order.

How MiniSell works? DataBridge and MiniSell proxy

Using a GPRS connection on their HTC TyTNs, the reps’ orders are uploaded to a secure proxy server and then forwarded to Viva’s MiniSell Databridge server. The reps’ data is then exported to Viva’s AS400 system for processing.

In turn the reps download regular data updates from the proxy. These update packages, which are generated by the MiniSell Databridge, include product, customer and promotion data, all of which updates the information available to the rep via their MiniSell handheld. The MiniSell Databridge is updated by a daily data import from Viva’s AS400 system.

MiniSell Online Reporting

As part of their MiniSell solution, Viva also uses Aspin’s online sales reporting system. This online browser based application provides secure access to a range of date filtered reports that give on rep activity, product and product group sales and rep appointments. From each of the report summary screens users can also ‘drill down’ on certain fields to sort the data or take a closer look at the orders or products that it relates to.

Viva are also able to control what data users are able to see via this system, with the regional sales managers only being able to view data to relating to the reps in their own area.

How has MiniSell actually benefitted Viva?

Since completing the move to the MiniSell Viva has received a range of positive feedback from the reps on the ground using the mobile devices on day-to-day basis, and they’ve found that many of the objectives that they set out to achieve have been met in a relatively short period of time.

For example, the ability to view current stock levels has given the reps greater flexibility to adjust orders and suggest substitutes to customers if they need to. A number of their reps have reported that customers prefer taking a substitute product over a back-order, which in many cases, has actually enabled the reps to increase their sales. This has also helped to reduce the time it takes to fulfil orders.

As a whole, by providing its reps with mobile handhelds, MiniSell and email communications, Viva has given them the tools they need to boost sales, which has helped to enhance and re-enforce the company’s image as a responsive business that is able to provide a consistently high level of customer service.

Kenneth Liming, Viva’s Senior Vice President of Operations and Information Technology, comments:

“We have empowered our sales team with the MiniSell system, remote mobile PDA's and back-end system integration... Aspin has been a great partner and has assisted us with a relatively quick rollout, and has since provided excellent support.”