One of the largest bakery companies in the world, having a presence in 33+ countries, embarked upon massive change management in their secondary sales process during the pandemic.

Our intelligent Route-to-Market solution helped the company deliver maximum value to its consumers, field forces, and stakeholders by providing scalability and elasticity to handle 800+ Sales Distribution Centers and 35,000+ sellers on the cloud.

Challenges Posed by the Pandemic

The company struggled to automate its distribution operations and could not adapt to the new normal during the onset of the pandemic. With reduced employees and the fact that bread is a perishable staple, the company had no way of pausing production, nor could they afford to delay deliveries. While they were struggling to get bread onto shelves fast enough, returns on bread were at an all-time high due to unpredictable demands and everchanging lockdown situations in the market.

Massive Scale of Operations

The King of Bakers has a presence across 33 countries, selling over 100 brands with over 10,000 products. Our solution went live in the Mexican market (their largest market) with over 35,000 field agents across 800+ sales centers in late 2020.

One of the most tedious tasks was gathering and digitizing their historical data lying in different data sources. Cleaning and sanitizing past data during migration is necessary to retain seasonality and other trends for better reporting and analytics. As a practice, we typically maintain large volumes of data for all our customers on the cloud, with maximum protection and privacy to secure it.

Over 800 data centers in Mexico went live gradually in phases, and the implementation took less than 18 months for over 35,000 users. With so many users and most of them logging into our solution between 6 AM – 8 AM, we implemented an Elastic model to manage the server capacity, pointing to a single database.

A great team on the customer’s side also helped us with this massive implementation and helped us with iterations. They provided their field reps with our standardized devices and tested and trained them on these devices.

Returns Management

Bread and bakery product distribution is one of the toughest in consumer goods, and our customer processes 30,000 orders per day across several thousand sales outlets. Each of these outlets will have two sales peaks, one in the morning (8 AM- 10 AM) and the other in the evening (4 PM- 7 PM). While with other product supply chains, you can think in weeks, the bakery business needs to plan in Hours. This challenge is compounded by returns/ reverse logistics management required for bakery products, and an empty shelf can mean lower sales.

With our intelligent route-to-market solution, the company is now supplying enough bread to fill shelves and slowly and steadily moving towards lesser returns and reduced cost-to-serve. With data visibility, intelligence, and analytics, the bakery company is now able to match volume and variety to market demand.

Collaboration Highlights

Solutions: Ivy Distribution Management System and Sales Force Automation/ Direct Store Delivery

No. Of Users: 35,000+

Daily Orders: 30,000+