Customer Story: Mobility is Business Critical for Retail Marketing and Sales Company

January 11, 2023

“SOTI is a valuable Acosta partner. SOTI MobiControl addresses the mobile security and management challenges of Acosta’s current business, and delivers a solid foundation to solve our future mobility needs as the CPG industry evolves.” John Morales, Director Enterprise Support Services

Acosta was founded in Jacksonville, Florida in 1927 as a local food broker. During the next 90 years, the company grew the scope and geographic coverage of their business to become the largest retail sales and marketing company in North America. Acosta employs over 37,000 workers in 140 offices across Canada and the U.S.A. More than half of the company’s retail professionals spend their time inside stores managing customer’s products — making sure they are on the shelf, in the right location and the correct quantity. Acosta provides the retail sales and marketing expertise for some of the most successful brands in the world, including Tyson Foods, Nestle, and Conagra Brands.

Industry: Retail

Operating Systems: Android

The Challenge

With so many workers on the road traveling store to store, mobility is business-critical for Acosta. To be productive, workers need key line-of-business (LOB) apps on their mobile devices. Acosta’s North American Retail System (NARS) is the main enterprise application. It schedules and dispatches over 15,000 merchandisers everyday. The merchandisers use NARS to deliver real-time information: surveys, pictures, reports and GPS data back to operational managers at HQ. Acosta first became a SOTI customer in 2001, using SOTI’s remote control solution to expedite remote device support. As their mobility strategy became more complex, their need for powerful and flexible mobility management support also grew. Their most important mobility issue is enterprise content management. Several times a day, remote workers access documents stored on the company intranet— branding guidelines, planograms, and customer agreement details. Acosta has an extensive file repository of over 20,000 directories holding more than 100,000 important files updated regularly. Merchandisers access files in the content repository based on their location, role and/or team. With over 17,000 Samsung mobile devices in use across North America, mobility management is a vital component of Acosta’s mobility strategy.

The Solution

In 2013, Acosta deployed a mobility management solution, Airwatch from VMWare, alongside SOTI MobiControl. It was supposed to deliver better content management for the company’s new Android devices. However, after deployment, it was clear that SOTI delivered more powerful content management features and superior technical support. In July 2015, Acosta standardized on SOTI MobiControl as their sole mobility management solution. SOTI MobiControl includes a secure content management application, SOTI hub. It supports LDAP integration so that remote workers can authenticate with their corporate Active Directory credentials to access the SharePoint files permitted by their location, company role or team. SOTI’s powerful application management enables device lockdown to optimize the user experience and only expose the applications (APK files) allowed by the users AD profile. In addition, Acosta relies on SOTI MobiControl for many other important mobility management functions:

• Technical support uses remote control to diagnose and fix user device problems in the field

• Training personnel use screen shot and video capture features to create online user training taught at Acosta University

• Hardware Depot service team controls asset inventory and device deployment features

The Results

Mobility is such an integral part of Acosta’s business that mobility management has become businesscritical. The company would not be able to execute its mobility strategy without SOTI MobiControl. It enhances mobile worker productivity — every day, multiple times a day, over 14,000 mobile workers access to the company’s content repository. Searching for a document takes seconds, and data use is minimized by only downloading and displaying document headers until the user selects a document for viewing. SOTI MobiControl makes it easy to get the right document to the right worker inside the right store. With SOTI as their mobility partner, Acosta knows that their mobility management needs are taken care of today and well into the future as they explore new device types and IoT technology.

SOTI is a proven innovator and industry leader for mobility and IoT management. Globally, over 17,000 companies depend on SOTI to transform their business by taking mobility to endless possibilities.

Mobility is Business Critical for Retail Marketing and Sales Company. (n.d.). Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www.soti.net/media/1446/acosta-casestudy.pdf