FFA

In our FMCG and Retail pages, we broadly illustrated the various challenges faced by the Manufacturer in aligning its Field Force teams.

Irrespective of whether the Field Force personnel are on the payroll of the Manufacturer or the Distributor, their performance makes or breaks a product or even an organization.

So it is in the Manufacturer’s best interests to deploy a nimble and realistic solution such as our Field Force Alignment (FFA) software in order to stay on top of their game. The software is designed in such a way that every stakeholder benefits from sharing data with each other.

Our FFA solution, which requires only a basic smart phone and is easily installed, is split into three parts:

Field Sales

This module addresses many of the Manufacturer’s wishes:

  • Field Force teams use FFA to create detailed profiles of each retailer. Data such as Contact information, type of outlet, frequency of service, priority, potential sales volume (as opposed to the orders booked by the Distributor) now start pouring into the FMCG’s HO. Using these, they can ensure that the Distributor is doing his best to service each retailer and maximize sales at each outlet.
  • Every Field Force person gets a handy Daily Schedule. This will tell him which retailers he needs to focus on, based on drop in sales volume or aging outstanding collections. And as he books orders at each retailer outlet, he will get alerts on the discrepancy between today’s order and better orders placed in the past.
  • At every point in time, he has a clear indication of targets versus actual sales. And since his productivity is monitored on a daily basis, he quickly learns to spread his sales effort across the whole month instead of trying to cover the deficit at the end of the month. Moreover, FFA maps the personnel’s location details to each data update. This reassures both the Distributor and the Manufacturer that field visits are actually taking place.
  • FFA can be used to give demos to retailers. Digital samples or marketing videos can replace physical samples, leading to cost reduction.
  • Net result: Enhanced sales volumes can be ensured using this mobile solution. To see how this solution benefited a well-known FMCG player, do read our Case Study Aligning the impossible.

Servicing

This module is relevant to the Consumer Durables domain. It can be used to assign servicing calls to the sales or technical team. Sales team can ensure timely delivery and technical team can conduct tasks related to implementation, training, troubleshooting and preventive maintenance in a streamlined manner.

Merchandising

The Merchandising module is typically used by the same Field Force personnel. It is marked by dynamic questionnaires that could be deployed at all outlets or certain kinds of retail outlets. The module allows visual information (images) to be exchanged both ways. The HO sends visual representation of a display they want set up. The sales team, upon completion of display, can send an image of the actual display.

Using the functions, the sales team can send:

  • Comparative data to understand distribution of retail space between oneself and the competitor; it can also record whether premium space has been provided, whether display units are located where they are supposed to be etc.
  • Any intelligence on new competition (information on new products, new campaigns for existing products etc).
  • Any other feedback from the retailer (on product performance, lack of availability of certain products, complaints against Distributor etc).
  • Information on audit or inspection of assets provided to the retailer (freezer, signage, display stands etc).
  • For details about how we innovatively implemented an FFA Merchandising solution for a large-scale FMCG company, please read our Case Study Getting the message across.

Thanks to FFA, the Distributor experiences business growth and the Field Force personnel work in a streamlined manner. As for the Manufacturer, it no longer has to accept blind spots as inevitable. Every crucial piece of data is now at hand. It can keep refining its strategy to suit ground realities.

As always, we ensure that our solutions work in an offline mode and can circumvent practical constraints such as low data speeds. In fact, compared to competing products which take 7-8 minutes to sync daily data over a 2G connection, our application achieves the same in around 90 seconds!

Getting the message across

Britannia has, for a while now, relied on 5 Merchandising Agencies that together employ 300 field agents to implement their merchandising tasks. Before the project began, Britannia had little visibility into the effectiveness of their merchandising work. So the key question became: can sophisticated merchandising data be received by the HO on a daily basis and consolidated in a meaningful manner?


Read the case study

"Channel Bridge was successfully able to roll out our nationwide mobile application. Security was a key challenge here, as multiple details of dealers from all over the country had to be stored efficiently and confidentially."

Mrs. Ramachandran, MD Texmo Industries