ASAHI SHOKUHIN Co., Ltd

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Re-inventing Sales Methods by Building a New Sales Support System

This example is a translation of an article that originally appeared on Fujitsu's Japanese Web site.

ASAHI SHOKUHIN Co., Ltd, a wholesale food distributor, has created a new sales support system in order to provide information to sales staff.
The purpose of the system is to improve sales activities by quickly and conveniently providing sales and purchase information for analysis to the relevant staff.
Symfoware Server and Symfoware Navigator were adopted as the core of the new system. Asahi Shokuhin built up an advanced end-user computing environment and shifted to a sales system based on three premises: proposal, organization, and process.

Creating Means for Strengthening Sales is Essential

Asahi Shokuhin is a wholesale food distributor, distributing a wide range of food and food-related products, such as frozen and chilled foods, snacks, and convenience goods.
Asahi Shokuhin’s scope encompasses not only secondary and tertiary wholesalers but also directly covers smaller businesses such as supermarkets and corner shops. Sales activities are meticulously planned to accommodate regional preferences.

"Our business partners number approximately 12,000 companies, to which we distribute about 300,000 different products. It's easy to say we're just an ordinary wholesale distributor, but not many distributors can run such a full-line operation," says Mr. Tsuneo Takeuchi, the manager of the Information System Department, with full confidence.

The company has a regional network from Ibaragi in the north down to Miyazaki, Kyushu, in the south, and is seriously considering introducing a self-support accounting system.
In an effort to increase profitability, the company established independent order-receiving and shipment and sales management systems at four branches. These measures enabled Asahi Shokuhin to forge close ties with local customers.

However, around 1995, the company changed this traditional policy. With the aim of standardizing sales, purchase, and inventory information internally, they installed a GS8000 series mainframe computer to centralize internal processing at their head office in 1999.

At the same time, they took up the challenge of arming their sales staff with information relevant to their particular sales activities. This is because, in the future, it will be essential not only to passively take customer orders, but also to actively propose sales to customers.
With the utmost urgency, Asahi Shokuhin had to build a new system that supported strategic sales activities.

Launching Sweeping Innovations in Sales Style

A prerequisite for the new sales support system was to allow end users to see the data they need as and when that need arose. End users in this case refers to sales representatives working in the field, not Information System Division staff. In other words, the new sales support system is a tool to support computing by sales representatives.

Sales staff can exploit the information accumulated in the system to make proposals to customers that best suit customers’ individual needs. In addition, sharing a variety of sales information makes possible systematic sales activities.

Mr. Kazuhito Tomogusa, the section manager of Information System Section 2 in the Information System Department explains, "Another important thing is to realize process-based sales strategies. We used to use result-based management, based on the sales data of the previous month, but this makes it hard for us to be responsive to changes in our business. If we can correctly grasp the prevailing business circumstances in the middle of a business process, we can develop our business faster."

Asahi Shokuhin has sought to rejuvenate and reform the old sales style by promoting end user computing.

Symfoware Offers Genuine Support to the Business Hub

A database is indispensable in order to exploit information for business purposes.
The core system of Asahi Shokuhin handles approximately 17 million purchase data items a year and approximately 10 million sales data items a month, which works out to a mammoth 340,000 purchase/sales transactions every day. Moreover, for 95% of transactions, because we are distributing products to end retailers directly (more than 20,000 distributions a day), more than 1,000 batch transactions take place every hour. It is extremely difficult to introduce an end user computing environment into this situation.
To solve this challenge, a data warehouse called "Actual Sales Server" was created.

Sales and purchase data are passed to the actual sales server via the core mainframe for users to be able to perform several analyses on the actual sales server. This is intended to support strategic sales activities, so the system must be high-performance and highly-reliable and be able to process huge amounts of data instantly.

Asahi Shokuhin adopted Fujitsu's UNIX server GP7000 series, the high-performance and highly-reliable RDB engine Symfoware Server, Symfoware Server Parallel Query Option (a parallel search function that searches through the database), and Symfoware Navigator Server (an R-OLAP infrastructure tool featuring a flexible multi-dimension data analysis and form creation).

"We chose Symfoware for predominantly the same reasons that we originally chose theGS8000 series, but in addition Fujitsu has a wealth of experience in distributive trade. We also heard that some of our major competitors had installed Symfoware and were benefiting considerably from its use. And so we finally determined that this must be our choice for our actual sales server," explains Mr. Takeuchi.

Another major reason was Symfoware’s cost-effectiveness.
"If we built the same system using another database, it would be cost several times as much. No matter how effective our sales activities were, profits would be adversely affected by the extra costs incurred by the system. In that respect, Symfoware offered the twin benefits of high-performance and low setup costs," says Mr. Tomogusa.

Asahi Shokuhin has 12,000 customers generating approximately 120 million sales data items every year, as well as 8,000 suppliers who generate an additional 17 million purchase data items yearly. The number of individual data items entering the whole system exceeds 540 million items annually.
2,000 client machines running four hours of batch processing (20,000 transactions/day) amounts to a phenomenally huge database system.

However, the response time of the system is quite satisfactory: "It slows down due to an upsurge in access immediately before the monthly sales closing, but this proves that the system is being used," says Mr. Tomogusa.

Free and Flexible Data Use

As this was a completely new system, the company worked hard to convince sales staff to make full use of it. "We asked for volunteers from the sales staff in designing the database and asked them how we should best accumulate data," says Mr. Takeuchi.

"As they did not have much experience in exploiting data, it initially seemed that they had trouble in determining how to apply the Symfoware Navigator data to their business activities," recalls Mr. Tomogusa who gave training classes in the new system to staff in branches around Japan.

The company’s efforts bore fruit and soon staff started to ask for electronic data rather than paper data.
The Asahi Shokuhin goal of end user computing in the field has now firmly taken root thanks to Symfoware Server and Symfoware Navigator.
More specifically, staff perform per-customer sales ABC analysis of transaction conditions by customer, product, and manufacturer using the actual data for ranking and examine trade conditions and perform per-manufacturer product ABC analysis by category taking into account the relationship with the manufacturer that has been delivering top products in each category.

"It used to be hard for us to exploit data centrally because different master files would exist in each of branches. The current system has changed this situation completely," says Mr. Takeuchi.
He hopes, "As the next step we would like to Web-enable the new sales support system to make it easier to gain full advantage of our data."

Company Overview

ASAHI SHOKUHIN Co., Ltd
Established: October, 1923
Capital: 1.56 billion yen
Number of employees: 2,494 (as of August, 2001)
Sales amount: 340.7 billion yen (as of March, 2001)
URL: http://www.asask.co.jp/
Overview of operations: An integrated food distributor that widely distributes products including general packaged food, frozen and chilled food, snacks, liquor, and housewares. Asahi Shokuhin seeks to develop food-focused enterprises under the corporate philosophy: "Aiming to grow with employees and with society by providing all business partners with services that satisfy on all counts".