Company Background & Mission
Superfoam was established 39 years ago with the sole aim of providing families, manufacturing, motor, farming and the hospitality industries with a range of sleep solution products like mattresses and pillows for a good night’s sleep.
They have since grown and diversified their products range to include Pillows, Foam Sheets & Cushions, manufactured using world-class technology in our state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Ruiru to meet different customer needs.
Superfoam’s Core Values:
- Doing More with Less: Committed to a low environmental profile with a focus on zero waste.
- Excellence: Good enough is not in their vocabulary. They are here to build a long term sustainable business.
- Customer Obsession: Customers are the centre of whatever we do at Superfoam. We ensure that we get the right consumer solution in all our initiatives. Safety and well-being of the customer is our top most priority.
Commercial Objectives
Superfoam was looking to drive its next stage of growth by digitally transforming its sales & marketing efforts.
With an initial focus on its sales channel, Superfoam was seeking to address some fundamental challenges holding its business back; specifically impacting channel profitability.
The Superfoam sales channel comprises over 42 routes covering more than 2,000 customers. Taking on average 50 orders every day, today’s operations rely on limited data from the back-office SAP system, an Excel-based customer database and manual field execution methods.
Challenges Faced by Superfoam
- Visit Management & Order Capture: Superfoam needs to digitise its Route Planning & Visit Management to deliver greater sales efficiency and improved visibility into sales rep activity. This includes the process of Order Capture, Discounting and Customer Payments when mobile & offline.
- Credit Management: When capturing new Orders, field sales reps need to be able to ascertain the credit position of the customer. A lack of visibility currently results in greatly increased Order Administration, unwanted Customer Satisfaction issues & adversely impacts delivery times.
- Sales Intelligence Memory: Superfoam wants to build a digital customer footprint. Armed with greater insight into sales history and buying patterns, Van Loading & Routing can be optimised. Improved survey-based intelligence will drive highly targeted sales activity and Promotions.
- Cross-Sell & Up-Sell: Superfoam is seeking an approach that prompts Sales Reps with a narrative about what they should be advising the customer to purchase and stock in addition to their regular orders.
- Reporting & Analytics: Reporting is currently an administrative overhead for Superfoam. Flexible reporting will free-up more of the Sales Manager to focus more on sales strategy and less on reporting admin.
The Aforza Solution
To address the challenges outlined above, Superfoam is rolling out the Aforza Consumer Goods Platform.
“Our legacy systems were holding back our growth plans. So we deployed Aforza to plan & execute sales visits, capture orders and upsell customers. We were live in just 5 weeks.” said Anurag Shah, Head of Sales at Superfoam.
This will be a a phased approach, starting with:
- Sales Planning & Execution
- Route Management, Visits, Ordering & Payments
- Cross-Sell & Up-Sell
Subsequent phases will include integration with M-Pesa for a smooth approach to payment collection, Trade Promotion Management (TPM) and AI-driven Order Predictions.
What’s Next
Sales are one of seven channels to market for Superfoam. The remaining six include Online, Wholesale, Service Centres/Depots, Supermarkets, Institutional and Industrial. The last two operate in a non-FMCG format where the time between leads and closing a sale is much longer and requires different kinds of administration.
Having proved the model with the sales team, Superfoam will seek to replicate these efficiency gains across these additional routes to market.
Superfoam is investigating the rapid opening of brand-new channels including Hawking (Van Sales). The Aforza platform is a front-runner to support the smooth opening and successful operation of these new channels.
The wider Superfoam Group includes sister companies in Uganda and Malawi both of whom are monitoring the rollout and evaluating the fit for their business.