Scenario: Top line growth is hard to achieve in the tough and highly mature consumer packaged goods market. A leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) company recognized that one of its most important assets for revenue growth was its extensive infrastructure of sales and merchandisers that worked in its retail customers’ stores. However, keeping an extensive network of resources in the field was a very expensive proposition and like other CPG companies it needed to improve the productivity of its sales and merchandiser organization to meet growth and profitability targets.
Challenge: Limitations of visibility to the actual logistical activity of the individual sales and merchandising personnel in the field made improving productivity highly challenging. The existing process was “open loop”, manual and relying on the sales people or merchandisers to report the time they spent in individual stores, miles driven, product placed and miscellaneous expenses. Managers would phone each sales person or merchandiser with instructions on what stores to visit when and for how long, but not know exactly what actually occurred during the week. The data reported by the individual sales and merchandisers in the field would be used to determine hourly pay, mileage, miscellaneous expenses reimbursed and in-store activity (e.g. cases worked).
Opportunity: For this CPG company to improve productivity, they needed an end-to-end GPS enabled management solution that would “close the loop” through the integration of store visit planning, tracking of field activity and payroll authorization using the tracking data. With a complete solution, this CPG Company could improve productivity through reducing hours paid, mileage and miscellaneous expenses reimbursed and increase product
merchandised in their retail customers’ stores.