Posted by Jungil Lee, Dong-A Pharmaceuticals

(Cross-posted on the Google Korea blog.)

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mr. Jungil Lee from Dong-A Pharmaceuticals. Dong-A Pharmaceuticals is one of many local businesses featured at Korea’s Geospatial Expo in Seoul. This event puts the spotlight on Korea’s growing geospatial technology sector and the businesses that are embracing maps and mobile work solutions to work smarter.

Being mobile is critical when you work in a mobile sales force, but prior to moving to the Mobile Smart Office and Google Maps API, our sales team faced some major challenges to being genuinely mobile. With only desktop PCs, our fleet of 1,000 sales staff had to look up hospital and clinic locations and check client records before heading out on the road. With each staff member making between 10 and 20 client visits per day, this meant lots of trips to the office to update records and look-up upcoming client locations.

To improve this process and place location and client information into the hands of staff where and when they need it, we decided to upgrade to the Mobile Smart Office in March 2012. A genuinely mobile sales support system, the Mobile Smart Office is a mobile application suite comprising of 10 apps on an iPad.Using Google Maps API, we integrated two apps, including the Mobile Sales Navigation app with Google Maps. Staff now use the Mobile Sales Navigation app to map out routes to multiple clients and add appointments to the system as they’re on the road throughout the day.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Google Maps is at the heart of Dong-A’s Mobile Smart Office and is indispensable for our field staff. It’s not only increased our team’s overall productivity, but has given staff the autonomy to choose the best routes and client schedules for them.