Retailers may not have direct contact with O4 Corp., but their profit margins may be improved by the company whose name stands for “out of office operations.”

A software company that provides solutions for product sales reps, merchandisers, drivers and others in the field, O4’s clients are stocking retail stores around the world, and its solutions are making a difference in everybody’s bottom lines.

“When a merchandiser walks into Wal-Mart 123 on Anywhere Street, his PDA has all the information about that particular store,” says O4 president Harris Fogel. But even more important, he will know what needs to be done in the store today, such as what promotions are about to break. He knows what the sales history is and will probably use a suggested ordering algorithm to ensure the right quantity is ordered and that the shelf is properly stocked.”

Several manufacturers are taking direct feeds from POS systems, Fogel says, and reps can observe each store in real time. When a stock problem occurs, they can correct it immediately. “We focus on helping retailers ensure that they’ve got the right product availability so that consumers can buy the products when they have come in to buy,” he says.

That focus got a big boost in March, when TrueDemand Software, a provider of solutions that lift sales at the shelf, partnered with O4. Industry analysts were enthused at the prospect of TrueDemand’s software-as-a-service suite — which provides valuable data of demand and delivery for store-level issues — being integrated with the software on O4’s PDA-style devices.

According to both companies, this partnership provides a “closed loop” system that prioritizes activities and reduces wasted manpower, while providing actionable data to the account team.

“By directly linking retail account teams with their field merchandising workforce, we have opened up unprecedented lines of communication that enable faster, more accurate sales execution on a daily basis,” says TrueDemand CEO Eric Peters.

During project review calls and quarterly status updates, clients give Fogel an earful — of appreciation. One said that, from a field merchandiser’s perspective, “‘on a scale of one to 10, [with] one being disaster and 10 being euphoria, your company is a nine,’” he recalls.

“They’re not going to rate anybody a 10 because they don’t believe in euphoria, but our solution is helping them be more effective when they go into the store. They know what they need to do and can give the right feedback in real time to headquarters. We know folks aren’t wasting their time because they’re focused on the right items in the right place at the right time.”

Easy to use
Another client told Fogel that one of his merchandisers was not very tech-savvy: When the company introduced O4’s in-store execution solution via PDA, he didn’t want it, saying it was just one more computer he didn’t know how to use. Now, according to the client, they’d have to pry the Motorola MC35 out of his hands.

That merchandiser said the solution is easy and makes him more productive. He reports having the ability to eat dinner with his family for the first time in three years and not have to work weekends compiling recaps. “Everything’s done automatically,” Fogel says.

What does a happy, productive rep mean for the company? “It means the person is more motivated,” Fogel says. “The data is real time, where before this rep was probably spending hours at night sending e-mail and Excel spreadsheets to somebody who then tabulated it and put it into another spreadsheet and then did something else with it. Now, everything automatically goes into a database, gets reported and away you go.”

The result is that the retail information helps the corporation determine where it should be redeploying and refocusing resources based on opportunities in the marketplace. “This process is sped up to where they can react within hours as opposed to days,” Fogel says.