Every executive in the wholesale and logistics business knows this story all too well. A motivated salesperson meets a customer and, eager to close the deal, promises delivery times that simply exceed the company's actual capacity. It was no different at Dexis Slovakia, a successful member of the international Descours & Cabaud Group with more than 240 years of history and annual revenues exceeding €5 billion. Sales representatives always wanted to go the extra mile for their customers but that commitment repeatedly created unexpected operational challenges.
“Imagine a salesperson visiting a customer and promising delivery the very next day,” recalls Miloš Vašek, CEO of Dexis Slovakia, a distributor of personal protective equipment and industrial supplies. “In the heat of the moment, they simply forget to enter the order into the system or tell anyone back at the office. The following morning, we end up looking unprofessional because the goods never arrive. What follows is emergency firefighting—a situation every logistics manager knows only too well.
”The consequences were severe on several levels. Internal relationships began to suffer as warehouse staff, buyers and salespeople blamed one another because they lacked the same information. The company's reputation—built on reliability and on-time deliveries—was directly at risk. On top of that, resolving a single urgent issue often required five or more employees from different departments to drop everything and get involved immediately. Vašek understood his salespeople's motivation, but as CEO he knew the business had to change. The answer came in the form of a comprehensive digital transformation built around the K2 enterprise management system.
If it's not in the system, it doesn't exist
Dexis Slovakia made a bold decision. Together with the K2 development team, the company started building a solution capable of tracking the entire order lifecycle in real time. The real breakthrough, however, wasn't the technology itself. It was a fundamental shift in company culture. A simple but uncompromising rule was introduced: If it's not entered into the information system, it simply doesn't exist.
“The sales team knows me well,” Vašek says with a smile. “After we introduced this rule, they came to my office completely shocked. They asked whether I was really serious—that we wouldn't deliver goods simply because someone forgot to enter the order into the system. I told them I was absolutely serious. It was an incredibly difficult period. In the beginning, we even lost several customers because we refused to make exceptions. But it was a necessary reset. Eventually everyone adapted, and today nobody questions that the business simply can't function without the system.”
To ensure adoption, K2 had to make life easier—not harder—for employees working in the field. The key was implementing the web-based version of K2, designed specifically for service technicians and sales representatives. It allows them to record customer interactions directly from their mobile phones immediately after each meeting, including through simple voice input.
Every activity recorded in the field is instantly linked to a specific sales opportunity, quotation, customer contact and responsible manager. Sales managers and representatives always have a complete picture of where each opportunity stands and what still needs to happen to close the deal. All this information is consolidated in K2 BI (Business Intelligence), giving management a reliable, data-driven view of business performance.
The implementation delivered exactly what the company had expected: measurable data and demonstrable efficiency gains. Today, every order is tracked from the moment it enters the system through final invoicing. The company knows that the average time from reservation approval to invoice is eleven days, while creating an order now takes just four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
The most impressive results, however, can be seen in warehouse operations. Over seven years of continuous optimisation, the company's logistics efficiency index increased from 14.54 to 35.62, dramatically improving productivity.
“Thanks to warehouse automation and the K2 warehouse management system, we've reduced our warehouse workforce from 27 employees to just 11 over seven years,” Vašek explains. “Naturally, every manager asks how employees reacted to such a significant reduction. Change is never easy, but this wasn't an overnight process. The transformation took seven years. At the same time, we were rapidly expanding our service of replenishing PPE vending machines directly at customer sites. Rather than laying people off, we gradually redeployed many warehouse employees into these new, more productive roles. They found new opportunities within the company, which helped us maintain a positive working environment throughout the transformation.”
