Brown and Company PLC, one of Sri Lanka’s leading conglomerates with 50 plus subsidiaries and associates focused on trading and strategic investments, is a vibrant and fast expanding diversified entity working in a broad range of industries including Trading, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Investments, Plantations and Renewable Energy, Travel and Leisure and Real Estate.

Getting digitally savvy: Taking forward the company’s rich legacy of over 143 years of delivering quality products and services to its customers and stakeholders, they recently entered into a strategic partnership with Axienta, a leading software company specialising in Salesforce Automation and Business Intelligence to modernise their operations in line with the advances taking place in digital technology.

Group General Trading and Consumer CEO Thushara Gamage stated that heightening customer demands and complexity in their constantly expanding operations had led to the need of driving better efficiencies, lowering costs and growing their business scale and customer base through an effective distributor network. 

“This can only be achieved by keeping our finger on the pulse of all our customer activities and having an in-depth knowledge of the products our customers are purchasing from our different business lines. Therefore, we needed a solution that was aimed at enhancing customer satisfaction and achieving transparency in our sales and distribution operations,” commented Gamage.

He further explained: “As such, we found Axienta’s ‘VANTAGE’ solution had the combination of sales force automation blended in with a distribution management technology that was the perfect mix we had been searching for.” 

Driving velocity into sales and distribution processes: Axienta Vice President – Customer and Partner Relations Stefan Fernando giving a further insight added: “The solution we designed for Brown and Company enables their sales reps to focus on the art of selling versus spending time on data entry and procedural work. It offers easy access to a host of innovative sales-focused digital assistants and tools that will help them close more deals faster. The ultimate aim of the solution is to drive and boost productivity with a focus on customer experience and increased sales-force effectiveness.”

Scaling-up operational efficiency: The solution is set to enable a new level of collaboration across Brown and Company’s sales and service teams as well as the interaction with customers and partners. The solution is customised to enhance and improve data interpretation and analytics for better performance and efficiency across their distribution and sales network, whilst streamlining processes, reducing risks and increasing reliability across operations. 

It empowers the company to have complete control of their multi-location distributor network and drive higher volumes across all distributor outlets by giving an in-depth view of stock availability backed by the ability to rotate inventory. 

The solution also gives management the power to monitor their large team of sales reps and measure their productivity, plans, and scheduled visits and have full visibility into all their activities at any given time. 

“We are confident that upon implementation of this solution it will contribute in improving sales growth against each territory and help simplify the work of sales reps who will be supplied with all the information they require in ‘real time’ to deal with customers and engage in ‘on time’ reporting. This will lead to better sales closure and will help boost the number of orders,” affirmed Gamage.

Well-armed to manage the next decade: Going forward, Brown and Company sees themselves investing heavily in technology as a way to build better know-how, capability and transparency in every aspect of their operations. Gamage mentioned that their partnership with Axienta was a strategic move taken in this direction.