It can be a challenge for companies that depend on independent sales forces to deal with marketing and distribution challenges. Innovative companies are finding solutions by implementing integrated, scalable, and dynamic Web-based order management systems that improve distribution, enhance communication, and cut costs. Learn how Tupperware North America, a US$1.3 billion company, chose Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle Portal to create its My.Tupperware.com portal because the products enabled the company to integrate back office functions, data management, calendar, mail, and financial systems, in real time in a secure, scalable environment. My Tupperware.com offers a high level of functionality, but the look and feel of the portal is intuitive and simple. The Web-based system has reduced costs. It also has improved efficiencies by enhancing support for consultants in recruiting others in the company and promoting product sales. Another important benefit of the system is that communication between support staff, corporate sales managers, and independent sales consultants is also streamlined.

As Published In February 2006

Sealing Success
By Molly Rose Teuke

Tupperware adds high tech to high touch and increases efficiency and ease for its sales force.

In the late 1940s, Earl Tupper turned to Brownie Wise, an energetic and engaging single mother, to help him capture a market for his revolutionary new food storage containers. He had patented the airtight Tupper seal in 1947 and introduced it into retail stores, but it wasn't catching on. Wise developed a party-based marketing and distribution plan for Tupper, and the Tupperware party was born.

Home parties remain a key sales strategy—a Tupperware demonstration party begins every two seconds somewhere in the world—but the US$1.3 billion company faces new marketing and distribution challenges in leveraging the reach of an independent sales force of some one million members worldwide. In 2005, Tupperware completed a transition in its U.S. operations—approximately 13 percent of the global business—away from a distributorship model toward a stronger multilevel compensation structure, in which sales consultants are paid a commission based on their own sales and a smaller commission on sales of those they recruit into the business to be part of their sales team.

"What was happening is that as sales consultants became successful and recruited more and more people to the business, they would end up facing so much paperwork at the top that they no longer had time to perform the strategic work of selling and recruiting," explains Ralph Napolitano, Tupperware's manager of application development. "We had to do something to ease that burden so they could get back to what they do best."

A related challenge was that distributors usually submitted several orders at a time, which meant Tupperware needed resilient technology with the capacity to process orders in big batches.

The Personal Touch

To meet that challenge, the company that made its name on innovation in the kitchen turned to technological innovation. But how does a business built on the strength of personal relationships incorporate technology without losing that personal touch?

Over the past 24 months, Tupperware North America has implemented an integrated, scalable, and dynamic Web-based order management system that has relieved distributors from the task of entering all orders for everyone they've recruited—their downline sales team. Instead, all sales consultants enter their own orders, which reduces stress on sales consultants with larger sales teams, and alleviates bottlenecks on the back end.

"Direct selling depends heavily on the ability of a sales force to attract new recruits to its ranks," says Bill Kester, senior director of industry strategy and marketing for consumer products at Oracle. "That recruiting aspect also plays into an emerging trend away from the traditional inventory-heavy push model of marketing to a demand-driven pull model. Companies utilizing multilevel compensation plans have a unique opportunity to increase demand, and the smart ones are doing everything they can to leverage that opportunity."

SPOTLIGHT Tupperware www.tupperware.com Headquarters: Orlando, Florida Number of employees: 5,900 worldwide as of FY 2004 Independent sales consultants: 1 million worldwide Revenue: US$1.3 billion in FY 2004 Products and services: Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Portal, Oracle9i Database

The Web-based system did that and more. It also streamlined communications among corporate managers, support staff, and independent sales consultants. In total, these tools cut costs while increasing efficiencies by better supporting consultants in promoting product sales, recruiting others into the company, and managing the downline sales teams that develop as a result of recruiting.

Single Sign-On Integration

Tupperware North America had tried technology solutions before, developing a Web-based order entry system and putting in place an outsourced information portal for its sales consultants. But by 2003, the cumbersome order entry system wasn't able to handle peak demand during seasonal and promotional swells, and the outsourced information portal was falling short on scalability, speed of access, and reliability of mail delivery. By definition, recruiting and keeping sales consultants active is critical to success in direct selling, says Mike Sheffield, president of Scottsdale, Arizona-based Sheffield Resource Network and a strategist in multilevel marketing. "Anything you can do to improve your communications with your sales force will enhance your retention and keep your sales force motivated," he says. "Electronic newsletters, interactive information portals, Webinars—we're using the internet to keep in touch in ways we never could before."

Growing Up

To encourage and manage growth and improve business processes for both the sales force and corporate staff, Tupperware needed a system capable of handling an additional 5,000 users each month, with the capacity to send e-mails to up to 50,000 recipients at a time and with role-based access to proprietary documents.

Timely dissemination of information to a growing field of recipients was a key challenge, acknowledges Phil Smart, Tupperware's senior manager of application development, but that was just one driver. "We had concerns over content publishing and our ability to drive informational content from a corporate point of view, to control how and when that content was disseminated to different levels within the company," he says. "We also knew that with this new business model, we could grow phenomenally, and the current architecture wouldn't support that growth."

"Our objective then was to bring it all in-house and put it on a scalable architecture that could be integrated with existing systems on the same platform. From a sales force point of view, integration of all the systems was one of the key benefits. If they signed on to this system, could they access all our ancillary systems with a single sign-on? With two systems, that wasn't possible."

It's a recurring refrain in the consumer products world, says Kester. "Information systems in this industry have been characterized over the last 20 years by highly fragmented point solutions that don't lend themselves to enterprisewide integration," he says. "The key to improving business processes in consumer products is cross-functional integration. When information is not integrated, when there's not a single view of the customer—in Tupperware's case, the sales consultant—that's a problem."

He adds: "The challenges are compounded when there's a clear delineation between the corporate employee hierarchy and the independent sales force, where there are fewer lines of accountability because consultants are compensated on commission and can choose their level of activity. Given that complexity, the need for information transparency across all those levels is extremely important."

Self-Service on the Web

Bringing an integrated system in-house meant the company would be streamlining communications and reducing transaction costs by leveraging a flexible, cost-effective architecture. The new portal, My.Tupperware.com, enables functional groups—Web support, training, sales promotion—to develop, publish, and "unpublish" Web content for specific audiences and within specific time frames without having to turn to the company's information technology specialists for help.

Back-end operations are now more readily accessed; the ability to view operations both upline and downline based on role-specific criteria is a key in motivating the sales force, from new recruits to experienced consultants and their downline sales teams. The portal offers four access levels, leading with a home page accessible to consumers, which benefits the company in terms of increased brand awareness. A second level gives all sales consultants access to order entry, training materials, e-mail, a calendar, and list functions. A third, fee-paid level offers additional marketing and promotional features and the ability for sales consultants to create their own e-commerce Web site tied to My.Tupperware.com. The highest level lets users access stronger promotional activity and higher compensation opportunities. Any sales consultant can opt for any level of accessibility.

While functionality has expanded, the look and feel of My.Tupperware.com remains simple and intuitive. "Ease of use was paramount," says Napolitano. "In creating this new, dynamic information portal, we wanted to help our sales consultants spend less time on administration and more time doing what they should be doing: selling and promoting."

For More Information LEARN more about Oracle's solutions for the retail industry at oracle.com/industries/retail

Profitable Outcomes

Rollout of My.Tupperware.com to 50,000 North American users was completed in the fourth quarter of 2004. Feedback from the sales force is positive, and the single customer data model across all applications has increased transparency in the company's business processes and performance, lowered the cost of ownership for its online activities, and reduced maintenance costs in its portal and back-end operations.

Tupperware chose Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle Portal because they enabled the company to integrate back-office functions, data management, calendar, e-mail, and financial systems in real time in a scalable, secure environment. "Security is the No. 1 issue when you're on the Web," says Smart. "You need secure sign-on and secure e-mail, and you need to know that certain information you publish to the Web site is being read only by your sales force."

Familiarity with the Oracle products also played a role. "The company has been using Oracle products for up to 10 years now," notes Napolitano. "We do honestly consider all the options, but we're going to lean toward the products that we have technology and resources in-house to support." Smart agrees, adding that "as Oracle continues to strategically enhance its application software, we have the ability to target that to our sales force. That was one of the critical things we wanted to ensure."

Three enhancements are currently on the horizon. Real-time Web conferencing will facilitate online rallies, which Napolitano believes will be a key feature as sales consultants use the Web to move beyond historic geographic limitations in recruiting new sales consultants.

Voice and text messaging are other features Napolitano hopes to implement. "These will be important tools for corporate to communicate with the sales force," he says. "If they have four or five different ways to communicate, that's better than two or three. For people who don't read e-mail every day, maybe they'll listen to a voice mail, or for people who don't listen to their voice mail right away, maybe they'll read a text message on their cell phone. We could also have an 800 number where certain levels of the sales force will have passcode access to a mailbox with a message from, say, the president or the head of sales. There's a lot of potential here."

As Tupperware continues developing its online functionality, one thing is certain: The people who built the company—the independent sales consultants—will be key players as well as key beneficiaries. "When they ask for a feature that will help them conduct business more effectively, if it makes sense and it can be costed out to be worthwhile, we consider it," says Napolitano.