Success Story

Sumitomo Rubber South Africa (Pty) Ltd is a subsidiary of Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd (SRI), which is headquartered in Kobe, Japan.

SRI has enjoyed a long relationship with the Dunlop brand both in terms of manufacturing and distribution. The company was first established in 1909 as the Far East Division of Dunlop UK and later incorporated as Dunlop Rubber (Far East) Co. Ltd in 1917. The company became Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd in 1963. In 1985, when Dunlop was taken over by BTR plc, the company acquired the automobile tyre assets of Dunlop, including the right to use the Dunlop brand on car tyres. In 1986, SRI also acquired the Dunlop Tyre Corporation of the US from its management. In 2013 SRI secured the rights to use the Dunlop brand throughout the African continent. The establishment of Sumitomo Rubber South Africa (Pty) Ltd in 2014 accelerated the pace of the company’s vision of expansion and development of innovative technology and safety throughout the continent; as well as accessibility to the iconic Dunlop tyre brand to every country within Africa.

The Challenge:

• Manual, offline and 3rd party dependent sales processes, mostly spreadsheet based to determine GP and process sales.
• Sales dependency on contact centre to place orders and request quotes via email or phone
• Real time and mobile access to information for sales staff on the road.
• The manual capturing and tracking of sales activities (calls or visits per day) on excel and the time and effort to consolidate and report on these KPI's are extremely laborious.
• An outdated look and feel dealer portal with limited functionality and dependency on data transfer which often makes data outdated.

The Solution

• Digitize and automate the sales processes including Activity-, Opportunity-, Quote- and Order management to enable the sales team to focus on sales rather than admin
• Automate the processes on Salesforce which via integration to SAP creates a real-time quote and order management system.
• Through Salesforce integration with SAP, enable the sale teams and extended user base to have accurate and up-to-date information when required.
• Create an automated and mobile activity management solution, synced to Outlook, to enable sales to efficiently manage customer engagement and reduce time wasted not only on the admin but also on the consolidation of reports.
• Create a new “fresh” customer facing B2B portal in which customer get access to accurate product and pricing information and the ability to not only create quotes and orders but also track the progress of these in real time.

The Outcome

• Digital, Mobile and automated sales processes deployed, which has increased sales process efficiency and optimized management's ability to effectively report and manage sales processes and activities.
• Enable self-service and reduced the dependency on the contact centre to create and process quotes and orders.
• Real time access to information they didn’t have access to before to better service and manage their customers
• Vastly reduced sale's team time wasted on admin around activity management through the enablement of a real-time, outlook integrated activity management solution which further enabled real-time accurate the reporting capabilities.
• By rebuilding and launching the new portal containing more functionality and a current look and feel, the customer usage and adoption is much higher than initially predicted with up to 3x higher usage leading not only to increased online revenue but also reduced dependency on sales and other internal staff to handle queries, process and track orders.