Divella brings order and pricing management to the cloud
The historic company, mill and manufacturer of pasta and biscuits, has chosen to improve and centralise its Retail Execution processes, ensuring the protection of company data and guaranteeing access to information even from mobile devices.
Challenge
Divella, a historic Italian company founded in 1890, has always prioritized quality control, the selection of raw materials, and technological innovation. With a daily production of 1,000 tons of dry pasta and 90 tons of biscuits, Divella has established a significant market presence, exporting its products to over 120 countries.
The project focuses on modern and traditional sales channels across all product categories, including dry and fresh pasta, biscuits, tomato preserves, and oil. Divella interacts with both direct and indirect customers, managing the latter through a network of dealers.
The company faced the challenge of updating its existing tools to streamline daily order management processes, both commercial and administrative. Without mobile devices for Retail Execution, sales agents had limited access to commercial information, which was scattered across various data sources, complicating analysis.
Effective management of commercial conditions and their real-time application to orders across all sales channels is crucial for Divella. These processes are resource-intensive, and Divella aims to enhance efficiency to improve customer service responsiveness.
Additionally, the company seeks new flexible and scalable solutions that ensure high security and data protection standards, facilitating further international growth.
Approach
Divella carried out a screening of the best solutions on the market, looking for an option with the functional completeness and flexibility required to operate in the CPG sector in Italy.
From the existing partnership, built over more than 18 years, XTEL proposed to Divella the adoption of the renewed Retail Execution Solution in the latest cloud version, for the integrated and multi-channel management of pricing conditions, orders, assortments, promotions in the traditional channel and sales force automation, through a digital business transformation project supported by XTEL’s partner NTT DATA.
XTEL Retail Execution Solution acts as a master system for the collection and management of all corporate orders, interfacing with the client’s ERP for the dispatch of already validated orders and the exchange of administrative information relating to all customers from all sales channels. Plus, the company’s real-time valuation, from the planning of customer activities to detailed business analysis, the entire process will be managed by a single cloud-based AI platform based on Microsoft Azure technology and Power BI, which maximises the collaboration and efficiency of all business departments involved in the process (customer service, sales, administration, logistics and production).
Insight
The cloud architecture of XTEL Retail Execution Solution provides customers with greater IT security and protection of company data, which is essential in light of the increase in cyber attacks in many large companies, including those in the CPG sector in Italy. The move to the cloud was, therefore, an important decision for Divella, which considered it a top priority and evaluated XTEL’s solution as the most suitable for the high-security standards offered. Another distinctive feature of XTEL’s order, pricing and Retail Execution Solution is that it is natively integrated with the other modules for managing the customer plan, sales forecasts, promotions and customer contracts.
The project team, experts in CPG and led by NTT DATA, ensured the implementation of the project and some very important features for Divella, such as the real-time calculation of the logistics discount during order taking and the type of vehicle for delivery, or upselling support for agents, showing all the benefits provided by the commercial policies applicable to the order for each customer.
XTEL AI Platform guarantees high business continuity and profound technological innovation, while also providing AI algorithms to optimise the orders proposed to the sales force.
Impact
Divella’s objective is to embark on a path of digital transformation by adopting state-of-the-art software, that guarantees maximum security and protection of company data, greater usability of data access, and allows processes to be improved and simplified. Making the most of new technologies to improve the relationship with their B2B customers and the collaboration between head office, sales force and dealers to stimulate sustainable business growth. XTEL’s solution will enable Divella to analyse business data faster, having a single consolidated data source, simplifying internal audits and enabling faster decision-making.
A key element of XTEL Retail Execution solution for Divella is to make the entry of orders, receipts and access to all commercial and administrative data of B2B customers by the sales force more usable, allowing them to be consulted also through mobile devices (tablets) and offering the possibility to work offline.
The organisation’s overall efficiency benefits from a digital evolution in which each work team can rely on up-to-date information in real-time to carry out their daily commercial and administrative activities involving the entire company.