Napco National partners with INDEVCO Consultancy on B2B transformation
Saudi Arabian manufacturer Napco National has overhauled the business model and commercial operations of its B2B division in order to ramp up efficiency and profitability, and build the capabilities and agility to stay on top of a changing landscape. The yearlong transformation was supported by consultants of INDEVCO Consultancy.
Back in 2017, Napco National’s B2B Solutions division (which manufactures and sells premium hygiene and paramedical disposables) faced a string of challenges in its commercial operations. To name a few: the business operated with a high-cost, territorial sales structure focused individually on customers, limited potential for scalability, key sectors that were underdeveloped, and price and margin erosion.
In addition, the customer experience varied significantly across customer segments, internal processes were mostly manual, and customer service was under pressure. All in all, the picture was clear: the B2B Solutions division needed to completely transform its business model and operations to keep up with the accelerating pace of change in Saudi Arabia and the circa 60 export markets it serves.
A large end-to-end transformation program was launched, which kicked off with the development of an overall business strategy (based on a comprehensive assessment over six months). Achieving the vision of this strategy, would require both a significant organisational change and a complete process and digital transformation of the business.
To help implement this vision, Napco National partnered with INDEVCO Consultancy, a management consulting firm with extensive strategic and operational experience in the industrials space.
INDEVCO Consultancy’s experts worked jointly with Napco National’s team on designing and re-building the B2B Solutions organisation. The joint team created a new sales and marketing matrix structure that ensured Sectors, Products and Customers would have appropriate focus.
Injecting new elements into the structure, the project team established new roles to enhance the customer experience, created new future-proof functions, reworked job responsibilities across the business, and realigned performance management with new key performance indicators.
Leveraging INDEVCO Consultancy’s deep experience in commercial excellence, a new B2B direct marketing system was designed and built. Following go-live, the new system would provide lead nurturing and targeted customer engagement, trigger direct conversations, and facilitate feedback on customer pain points vital to the digitalisation of the customer experience, all serving to drive customer retention and loyalty.
These mechanisms were subsequently woven into a digital transformation that electronically linked the entire ‘Lead to Prospect’ process to the ‘Active Customer Arc’. This rollout in addition armed account management with the digital tools to complete the customer engagement loop. Further to this, an entirely new business dashboard system was created and deployed.
“We could not have accomplished this transformation without the experience and guidance from INDEVCO Consultancy.”
– Dean DeLoe, Vice President B2B Solutions at Napco National
To enable and embed the new ways of working, INDEVCO Consultancy guided so-called ‘Business Roadshows’. These Roadshows helped to communicate the comprehensive and integrated nature of the change across the five countries in-scope for the transformation.
Reaping the benefits
Fast forward four years since the launch of the program, and the strategy has been defined, initiatives have been rolled out and employees have adopted the new ways of working. According to Dean DeLoe, the lead of the ‘B2B Solutions Strategy’ and now Vice President B2B Solutions, Napco National is reaping the benefits of the transformation.
“What we started a few years ago was the equivalent of setting out to land on the Moon. We set an objective to totally revolutionise the business-to-business supply industry in the GCC. The technology, tools and structure did not yet exist. The original business had still used practices from the 1970s!”
“Now just a few years later, change and digitisation in this region compounds every year at an exponential rate, and Napco B2B Solutions is ready to lead that revolution.”
Collaboration with INDEVCO Consultancy
“We could not have accomplished this transformation without the experience, skills and guidance from INDEVCO Consultancy. They uniquely had the capabilities to help us realise a vision that at the time seemed unattainable,” said DeLoe.
Among the key initiatives and expertise delivered by NDEVCO Consultancy included:
- Re-designing the organisational structure to better manage the implemented change
- Creating an integrated B2B direct marketing system
- Building a world-class online customer platform, coupled with a CRM system and a service support center to digitalise and add value to the customer experience
- Setting up a performance management and career development structure to enable a fully engaged workforce
- Initiating a sector-based selling model to better service customers
- Establishing the links with the logistics and supply chain to drive delivery efficiency
- Introducing business intelligence to have a maximum visibility of data and insights
- Transitioning the legacy sales approach to a new digital-first approach
Speaking on the firm’s involvement, Maya Khalifeh, an award-winning Principal at INDEVCO Consultancy stated: “As customer experience is the new product and time is the new price, we believe that Napco National B2B Solutions’ customers will greatly benefit from these initiatives and projects.”