FileMaker Syncs Across Africa Using 360Works MirrorSync: Promasidor Case Study and Success Story
FileMaker Synchronization Across the Continent of Africa using 360Works MirrorSync in a Solution for Promasidor Food and Beverage with Experience Shared from Technology Professional, Serge De Pauw at Promasidor
Introduction
Promasidor is a large scale African food and beverage company, providing quality nutrition items such as dairy, cereals, drinks, and culinary to 30 countries throughout Africa. The company produces, distributes, and markets their full range of products in-house.
Serge De Pauw is responsible for Information and Communication Technologies at Promasidor, and he was gracious enough to share his experience using 360Works MirrorSync in his FileMaker solution. Serge is originally from Belgium, but has spent the past 4 years in Ghana and prior to that 14 years in Nigeria, furthering advancements in African technology.
Serge and his team have developed a FileMaker solution called Go To Market (GTM). It is a route-to-market application for their mobile field sales and marketing operations that provides features such as point-of-sale, stock and sales transactions, as well as Salesforce automation to integrate routes and in-store tasks for their field reps who are distributing marketing intelligence surveys. The solution also has a back-office web application, Microsoft Power BI dashboards, and reporting components.
Business Challenge
Their FileMaker solution was developed gradually over about a year, based on specific needs for their markets, field sales, and distribution. Their current roll out is a continent-wide digital transformation project, which was slow at the start, but has started picking up momentum at the end of 2020, Serge reports. They are still early in the deployment, but already serve over 600 mobile users in 5 countries with several more waiting to come on board. The largest country, Nigeria, is expecting to reach over 1,000 users.
According to Serge, in Africa, ?modern trade? as they call it (e.g. supermarkets) is still a very small percentage of the food and beverage products distribution. Identifying, understanding, and reaching their largest customer base is crucial. The customer base can be located all around in places like table tops in open markets, container shops, and similar free-standing mercantile. The automation of their mobile sales and marketing activities is a key growth factor for the business.
While some urban areas in Africa have relatively good mobile network coverage, many non-urban areas have either poor quality connectivity (3G and Edge) or none at all.
It is critical for Promasidor to have their mobile solutions handling daily business functions throughout the continent, regardless of location connectivity.
Successful Solution
In order to resolve the connectivity issues, Serge and his team designed their solution for Promasidor to work entirely off-line using 360Works MirrorSync. This enables their mobile users to continue working for portions of their day or sometimes even days at a time without any internet or data connection.
"We're very happy with the performance of MirrorSync which works well even with a 3G connection," Serge reports.
Promasidor's servers for FileMaker and MirrorSync are located in Europe, leveraging the AWS Cloud Infrastructure.
So far, the users have registered (created on mobile and synced with MirrorSync) about 120,000 outlets in their database with potential relevant ones to come that will be over a million. For each of them, they register data points like GPS location, contact information, as well as pictures in container fields (shop front, contact person) for identification purposes.
MirrorSync is built to support FileMaker container field syncs and to handle multiple client simultaneous syncs with large volumes efficiently.
"Our users create (and sync) 30,000 to 50,000 stock and sales transaction records per day. Nigeria alone has already passed the 2 million transaction records, and the pace is accelerating," says Serge.
Conclusion
Serge and the team at Promasidor are able to use their Go To Market (GTM) solution to conduct business across Africa. Sales reps will perform a sync in the morning for any stock transfers and all users complete a full sync at the end of each working day to wrap up any business updates.
MirrorSync plays an important role in the efficiency of the food and beverage distribution app built by Promasidor to serve quality food across the continent of Africa. By keeping FileMaker in sync while out in the field in urban and non-urban areas, employees are able to successfully work from anywhere!
For more information or to download a free version of MirrorSync, please visit 360works.com/filemaker-sync.
