“The IT solution provided to us by XTEL allows us to face the great and growing complexity of our markets in a structured but agile way, to achieve our commercial objectives in the short and long term: sustained growth in turnover and market shares, full satisfaction and partnerships of our customers and consumers, and Profitability with Purpose of our business. Thanks to XTEL, we feel serene in facing the new challenges that the future will offer, without fear of continuing to invest in the growth of the Group, its people and its brands.”
Challenge
The XTEL/Sodalis partnership was born in 2003 and has undergone a rapid evolution ever since, weathering many acquisitions and changes brought upon by globalisation.
Among their most recent acquisitions are brands such as Lycia, BioNike, Deborah, ESI, and Natural Honey, which, alongside their original brands that have led most of their organic growth, namely Vidal, Fresh & Clean, Leocream, L’Arbre Vert e Tesori D’Oriente, have led Sodalis to reach 500 million Euros in revenue.
Sodalis’ main challenge in the last few years has been managing growth as they expand internationally while maintaining an agile and dynamic structure, which is critical to ensure quick decision-making in the market. It was a strategic priority to put a solution in place that could help them overcome the challenges that come with increased competition, sales channels and the general complexity of processes.
“The accelerated path of growth that we have undertaken has made it vital to find the right compromise between the need to structure Sodalis organisationally and at the IT level processes/systems to remain agile and lean in order to be able to adapt quickly to a constantly changing market and consumers, without losing the strong entrepreneurial spirit that distinguishes our organisation.”
Approach
The numerous acquisitions required a consolidation of various tools, which made it necessary to implement a very flexible solution, capable of managing and standardising data between business units and adapting to market dynamics.
XTEL proposed to Sodalis Group a Digital Business Transformation program on a cloud platform, aimed to harmonise the management of all back-end and front-end commercial processes.
This single integrated solution would not only support the organisation from planning to execution, but would also fuel and facilitate collaboration and help each team work more efficiently (sales, trade marketing, merchandising, customer service, customer administration, finance and accounting, management control, demand planning).
Sodalis decided to integrate channel, customer, and promotional planning and execution, trade terms and conditions on and off invoices, pricing and management of all orders, order-taking and collections, execution of internal store, and integrated BI reporting. There was particular attention paid to the commercial conditions and dynamics typical of the Italian market, to manage the complexity of the multi-channel context and the specificities of the modern, traditional, specialised, perfumery and Pharmacy sales channels.
Finally, the improvement of the user experience was a key priority to ensure maximum adoption of the solution by the entire sales force.
“The shared goal with XTEL was to make available to Sodalis users of different organisational functions, within a single system, multiple sources of information that could improve decision-making processes. Today, more than ever, in complex organisational contexts, it is necessary to make decisions that are widely shared between the various functions and supported by a robust amount of data, but at the same time it is vital to take them quickly in order not to lose business opportunities: the XTEL approach is exactly in this direction.”
Insight
The XTEL solution serves as a single source of truth across Sodalis Group’s business units, producing more efficient collaboration between departments, and actionable insights.
The integrated management of all contractual and pricing conditions, both on and off-invoice and for all sales channels, allows for the immediate and correct application of the conditions of the order, along with a complete backlog of information to improve customer management for both “customer service” and key accounts. Integrated reporting allows for real-time updates of the customer P&L, providing accurate and updated reflections of fiscal performance.
Impact
Maintaining an agile and dynamic structure has allowed Sodalis Group to quickly implement their strategy and improve ways of working across teams.
The adoption of the new XTEL solution by the entire customer organisation has positively impacted the management of B2B customer relationships. This is possible thanks to the 360-degree view of activities that apply to the customer, and the depth and breadth of the end-to-end solution.
The complete visibility of commercial investments, from planning to analysis, has allowed Sodalis Group to maintain a high degree of control over spending in a context of market variability and group dynamism.
The IT department benefited from the simplification of IT governance and the improved levels of security and protection of corporate data.