IBM mobile technology lifts salesforce productivity for Patties Foods

As the manufacturer of Four’N Twenty Pies, Patties Foods is one of Australia’s most iconic bakeries.

Patties recognised that in order to drive greater customer engagement, revenues and productivity, its field sales teams needed to spend more time with clients and less time in the office. A secure technology solution was required to facilitate this.

IBM business partner ISW worked with Patties Foods on its mobile strategy and selected the IBM cloud-based enterprise mobility management solution MaaS360 as a cost-effective and scalable solution that allows a mobile workforce to quickly and securely access the resources they need.

The solution will enable client facing sales teams to securely access real-time reports, customer profiles and set-ups, the latest promotions, merchandise and store planning tools, order placement, route planning and asset management applications from their mobile devices anytime, anywhere.

MaaS360’s security functions have proven crucial as the business embraces a ‘mobile-first’ approach to growth, allowing the business to quickly wipe corporate data from individual devices without damaging personal information.

“We are seeing the business benefits of our people spending more time in the market with our customers, suppliers and distributors. MaaS360 helps support our field sales application and various other software to give our people the agility in the field to make more visits and deliver higher-touch results at each point, while also maintaining a secure and extremely well-maintained perimeter around our corporate network at minimal cost,” said Zelko Erdec, general manager of information technology at Patties Foods.

The new solution has allowed Patties Foods to decommission three servers and reduce maintenance overheads to virtually nil. Hosted on IBM Cloud, MaaS360 connects seamlessly with Patties Foods’ on-premise data, email and other content repositories, providing significant OpEx cost savings without compromising users’ breadth or depth of mobile access.

“Not only were patches and upgrades a burden with our previous solution, but each upgrade would also take anywhere from two days to a week to complete,” said Zelko. “With the MaaS360 solution the usual maintenance hassles are all handled in the background, allowing our technology team to focus instead on optimising the mobile experience for our salesforce and providing applications that further enhance the customer engagement.”

“Security is paramount. We wanted to provide Patties with a solution that was secure, and also delivered great functionality for the user, was simple to implement and could be scaled to meet the growing needs of their business,” said Theo Vereker, cloud practice leader at ISW.

Image credit: ©Sergey Nivens/Dollar Photo Club