Improved internal efficiency for an F&B distribution company

Our assessment confirmed operations were inefficient due to unstructured utilization of sales force resources. Salesmen were not scheduled properly; their roles and responsibilities were not defined clearly; they were not compensated based on their performance. All these collectively led to discrepancies in the overall offline sales process.

Our analysis also revealed that the company approach towards client assessment while onboarding, acquisition, and retention are purely done on hunches and not backed by data. The customer categories contributing a significant portion to sales were treated in the Define value chain Map out key activities Gather data related to key activities Define key metrics to assess activities efficiency Data wrangling and analysis Results and solutions same way as other customer categories. Furthermore, the company was not aware of the regions nor the product categories contributing majorly to their revenue as they were employing the same number of resources in every region and maintaining a similar amount of inventory for every product category.

The company demand forecast was not considering the fundamental aspects of the market and was based on random assumptions leading to a huge amount of excess inventory.

All of these were collaborating to low ROI and diminishing EBIT margin.

Based on these findings, we proposed a set of corrective measures broadly classified into quick fixes and sustainable differences. Using these results, we suggested management promptly work on their compensation model for sales representatives. We delivered them a customized model based on the industry standards and sales representative effort. The idea is to keep sales representatives engaged and motivated and let them feel like a partner instead of an employee.

We also encouraged management to utilize their IT resources like Repsly, Xero, etc. not as data feeding tools but as data analysis tools to make informed demand forecasting, resources deployment, and sales planning.

Additionally, we proposed to develop KPI’s and implement them at each level of the hierarchy and for each activity of the value chain and constantly monitor them on monthly basis. Developed KPIs were able to capture every detail of any particular activity and any minute discrepancy was identified instantly making the process robust and efficient.