Route to Market Transformation of a Leading Cooking Oil Brand to Boost Sales and Improve Margins

The cooking or Edible oil market in one of the largest markets in Southeast Asia is estimated to be 13 million tons (mt) and is the largest importer of edible oils. Our client, a leading edible oil brand, views supply chain and secondary sales management as differentiators in the market. The edible oil giant was determined to digitize its national sales operations end-to-end. Venturing into packaged food products, staples, and industrial derivatives added more products to their portfolio, making it tedious to manage distribution effectively across the country. With annual revenue crossing $5 Billion, this company has a 40% growth year on and year, and scalability is another capability they were keenly exploring when looking for a Route-to-Market solution.

Different Trades and Many RTM Roles in One Market

With the country’s regional split and numerous processes involved in managing sales and distribution, the company didn’t have a consolidated performance view and lacked real-time visibility into field activities. A mix of traditional, modern, and rural trade made the situation even more complex, with each RTM role using a different platform for processing sales orders. Manual consolidation of these sales orders was not effective and fast, leading to delayed decisions and reactive strategies.

The company is conscious of its carbon footprint, and moving away from paper bills and receipts as soon as possible was the need of the hour. The edible oil giant was looking for a cloud-based solution to make its business processes digital and provide better business visibility and traceability with required scalability.

Multiple resolutions with a single solution

The Edible Oil Giant started with Ivy Direct Store Delivery/ Sales Force Automation solution, with a Supervisor application to bring all their business processes on one platform. Post integration with their ERP application, we implemented a custom back office and an invoicing model for them. With features like catalog-based ordering, real-time stock view, and trade promotions module, our mobile sales solution for android devices was an instant success across the market and in various forms of trade. Here are some of the highlights of our solution:

  • Our supervisor application could track retail store visits and manage field agents’ productivity daily, weekly, monthly, and so on.
  • Identified KPIs by the business are visualized on a dashboard and reported via custom reports for various stakeholders.
  • Field activity data was directly feeding into the central database of our Unified Commercial platform to ensure zero loss of data and achieve a Single Source of Truth.
  • The cloud-based application ensured that the stakeholders could access customer information, orders, and other details at any time.
  • The journey plan for each field rep was provided from the solution, making it user-friendly for the sales rep to manage time properly.
  • Our Retail Execution solution for Modern trade supports end-to-end merchandising activities for the company, such as retail audits, availability checks, price tracking, planogram compliance, POSM management, and more.
  • Sales return management on mobile pay supports seamless and traceable sales returns by store, and a single visit of the sales rep could achieve orders, delivery, and returns handled simultaneously.

Digital Sales Operations for Increased Sales

The Edible Oil giant has been working with us since 2019 on Route-to-Market optimization and has been successful in digital transformation. The stakeholders and decision-makers of the company can track and assess KPIs and retail store metrics to understand how sales performance is in real time. Hierarchy-based dashboards help the assigned stakeholders view the exact information essential to making decisions.

Geo-fencing feature tracks and locates retail stores in rural markets and also helps field force agents visit more retail stores, leading to a 10% increase in orders placed via our solution. Currently, the conglomerate captures over 6 million orders monthly.

Collaboration Highlights

Monthly Orders: 600,000+

No. of Supervisors: 450+

Size of the Field Force: 3000+

Growth: 10% Increase in Order Volume YoY

Share this