Lindt & Sprüngli Canada, having completed a long and meticulous revision process to replace its current Sales Force Automation solution, now officializes its choice of the Companion® Suite of applications, offered by CIS Group.

The objective was not merely to improve the efficiency of its field sales force of 93 representatives by giving them a feature-rich tool to replace their existing one.

An equally important consideration was to ascertain the long-term capacity of the provider, considered as a key partner, to maintain an evolving solution through assiduous development efforts, so as to support all current and future business requirements.

“Undeniably, the fact that we give high priority to massive and constant investment in R&D strongly worked in our favor, recognizes Eric Tessier, Vice-president Sales and Marketing at CIS Group. In addition, since we team up with clients in many vertical markets, we may be called at any given time to undertake development to meet a new need in one of those markets, to discover about just as fast that it becomes a benefit for clients in other verticals – even if they are to use it somewhat differently.”

The Companion® applications will be interfaced to exchange data with JD Edwards, the enterprise resource planning system, receiving master data from it, while returning orders and credits. The same will be done between Companion® and Cognos, to allow retrieving point-of-sale data obtained from the store chains.

Sales representatives will thus be empowered with permanent access to integrated store-level POS (point-of-sale) and shipment data, and order history. Overall standardization of the visit sequence will be facilitated – combined with banner-level customization.

The fifteen users of the Companion® Office application will similarly be in possession of the whole array of data from in-store visits and audits with reduced effort – pricing, distribution including new listings, planogram compliance, and surveys among others, will all be made available and easily interpretable through built-in automated reports and customizable dashboards.

About Lindt & Sprüngli

Rodophe Lindt’s company was founded in 1879 in Bern, Switzerland. Whereas at the time, chocolate was only known as a hard product, which had to be chewed, this man was first to produce melt-in-the-mouth chocolate, through the invention of the conching process – vigorous stirring at 80 degrees Celsius for numerous hours that polishes the particles, develops the flavor, and allows adding in the extra cocoa butter, the sugar, possibly milk, etc. Rodolphe Lindt’s enterprise was bought in 1899 by the Zurich company Sprüngli, itself founded in 1845. The brand became Lindt & Sprüngli, and never stopped growing since. The company is based in Kilchberg, Switzerland, and has its Canadian head office in Toronto.