The Client:
A Germany-based global food delivery service company that operates through multiple regional brands providing online food delivery and related services across countries, recently expanded into quick commerce for grocery delivery and logistics.
The Challenge:
The client already operated on Salesforce to manage its food delivery business, and with expansion into quick commerce, wanted to onboard Salesforce CRM for this vertical as well. The client maintained a supplier portal with details such as supplier company name, address, tax ID, and unique supplier ID, which needed to be ported onto the new Salesforce platform. It also needed to create functionalities to tag stock keeping units (SKUs) with multiple suppliers for visibility into inventory, planning, and logistics.
The client further needed help to digitize supplier contract management, which was manually done by category managers in silos with finance and supply chain teams. This led to discrepancies in payments, rebates or fees from suppliers, and impacted visibility into stock availability impacting sales.
The client turned to Persistent for its Salesforce expertise and retail domain knowledge to operationalize a Salesforce platform that supports and streamlines quick commerce operations. The client also wanted to take this opportunity to reevaluate and improve current workflows in line with Salesforce’s best practices as to significantly boost annual revenues.
The Solution:
Persistent’s Salesforce consultants and retail process experts worked with the client’s business teams to implement Salesforce-based quick commerce platform in a two-phase project approach.
In the first phase, the team focused on streamlining workflows for supplier management, contract management, opportunity management, along with integration and migration of the supplier portal data to the Salesforce platform. We built automation and AI capabilities to digitally capture contract and supplier information as machine-readable data points in a central data warehouse that would be the foundation for the Salesforce platform. We integrated digital signing tool to streamline contract generation, supplier onboarding, and trading terms. Together, these two workflows would help the client securely store critical data and documentation such as company and tax registration, necessary for compliance.
In the second phase, the team will focus on streamlining cross-functional interactions between category managers, supply chain team and finance to accelerate business objectives, such as higher fulfilled orders, opportunity tracking leading and improved availability that would cumulatively lead to higher sales.
Run as an iterative implementation, the project adopts a hybrid agile methodology, and a detailed project plan with two releases and a cluster roll-out.
The Outcomes:
With Persistent, the client’s Salesforce CRM for its quick commerce vertical will deliver:
- 100% transparency in supplier relations management across teams that bolsters coordination, improves visibility, and enhances operational efficiency
- Digitized information extraction and retrieval ensures timely P&L calculation and collection of rebates/fees from suppliers, potentially improving cost of goods sold by 0.35%
- Enhanced opportunity tracking will lead to 0.2% increase in gross merchandise value (GMV)
- Visibility into the stock unit availability will lead to a 1.8% improvement in GMV for Supplier to DC SKUs, and 6% for Supplier to Store SKUs
- Overall contribution to annual profit will be to the tune of €10 million
Technology Used:
Salesforce Core CRM Functions, including Sales Cloud, Supplier Portal, and various integration and migration tools
