The client & background:
It is a renowned name in the Food industry segment. A multinational with a strong presence in India. Established for more than 10 years. It is typically an urban product, promoted in Metro, min-Metro and Grade A cities. It requires a Freezer to store and maintain the products in retail. Hence, it is promoted through Modern Trade and general trade which can meet this requirement. With more than 150 distributors across India, promoted using TV and other digital media, the product is a household name. With a good ERP and analytics solution, they could digitize and analyse their operation.
However, they did not have visibility of the market information – Secondary Sales. Essential to view the sales, plan promotions and then reimburse the distribution chain – accurate, detailed and regularly available about the width and depth of distribution. They had a manual method of collecting secondary sales data, and then collating information across all branches to present it to the management and the sales team for planning.
This is where Zylem came in. To replace the manual method of collecting data and reporting. And increasing the frequency of data collection and accuracy of data presentation.
The concerns expressed were about the acceptance by distributors, technology, service support and of course cost of the project. Plus the global team wanted their compliance about infrastructure and security.
About Zylem:
The “Zylem” software solution is based on Microsoft Platform – Dot Net Framework and MS SQL database. Central MIS is hosted on Cloud and Data collection components are deployed at the Distributor end. Plus there is “Zylemini” mobile App that can be given to the sales team.
The central solution can be accessed using any of the popular browsers and a secure Internet connection. The Access rights are assigned as per the role of the users and that controls what information and to what level can be seen by the user.
Since this customer is a Multinational company, SAPL had to meet the security concerns of the global team. Hence from the deployment in the cloud, to the way data is uploaded and the way it can be accessed, everything had to meet the Global Team’s approval.
Rollout phases:
It was decided to roll out the solution in phases. 1st Phase of 25 distributors, 2nd phase of another 50 and Then ramp it up to cover all potential distributors. That way we can focus on successful implementation of each phase and resolve all queries in data collection and reporting.
Solution Architecture:
After installing and configuring the central solution, data from remote distributors was imported into this, after cleaning, error correction and de-duplicating. Then the results were offered to the sales team for comparison and correction wherever required. An audit process was set up for comparison and check. The solution has been rolled out Pan-India as per phases, using remote access technology.
In some cases, as required, SAPL executives travelled to meet the distributors along with the company executives to explain and install the software.
The solution has also been configured and customized to meet their reporting requirements.
Data Collection:
After analysis of the distributors and their DMS software, it was decided to follow the following method of data collection – Extract data from the DMS database directly, wherever possible – using Zylem-connect on a database. Get data in a standard format where direct extraction is not allowed – using Zylem Connect on the file. Get a report with all the elements and then convert to get required data – using Zylem converter on the report to convert the report to data and then use Zylem-connect to get the required data.