Qarshi Industries (Pvt.) Ltd. is one of the largest natural products manufacturers in Pakistan. Iconic brands like Qarshi Jam e Shirin and Qarshi Johar Joshanda have established Qarshi as a dominant player in its market segments. Qarshi was facing the difficult challenge of tracking, recording and monitoring thousands of orders, payments, and deliveries on a daily basis at a national level.
Qarshi Goals
The Qarshi team initiated the project with a very ambitious and clear set of goals:
- Automation of distribution and tracking of secondary sales across all Qarshi Divisions
- Improved coverage of retail outlets
- Increase sales staff efficiency and productivity
- Automated route planning and agent field tracking using a mobile application
- True Paperless environment
- Decision Support System with dashboard and analytics across all business areas
- Integration with SAP ERP
- Disaster Recovery and High Availability to ensure business continuity
Sales and Distribution Operation Challenges
Qarshi was totally reliant on manually maintained Excel Sheets to manage operational flows and produce visibility. These manual processes were resulting in the inefficient execution of orders as well as delayed reporting on ground operations. There were several major issues such as:
- Field agents were making errors while recording orders, deliveries and payments manually.
- Field agents had to wait in processing queues for hours on their return to branch offices after a day’s work taking orders in the field.
- There was no systematic way to track tertiary sales i.e. consumption from retailers to end users.
- Analyzing the sales target achievement rate of field agents was very difficult and time consuming
TMX-SD as the Solution
TMX-SD is a field mobility solution for managing end to end sales and distribution processes with a mobile application for field agents and a web portal for branch, regional and head office administration. It allows field agents, distributors and retailers to manage key tasks with ease and efficiency. TMX-SD addressed the main issues of Qarshi as:
- The mobile operates in both online and offline mode. The interface just requires the agent to add quantities of products, hence reducing the chances of errors.
- Orders entered in the mobile application are automatically synced on the administrator’s web portal so the field sales team does not have to wait in queues for end day tasks.
- TMX-SD has a comprehensive inventory management system through which administration can track all related transactions: batch upload, stock issuance, stock transfer etc., to and from a particular warehouse.
- TMX-SD has a complete empty bottle management system that keeps records of the deposits, returns and sales on a per-customer basis.
- Agent geo-tracking in TMX-SD enables management to view the daily field journey of each field agent and tracks each activity performed (e.g. order taken, cash collected) with a map location as well as a date and time tracking.
- TMX-SD provides a color coded Order Booker efficiency report based on the number of productive shops in the field agent’s daily journey.
- TMX-SD provides both distributor and order booker wise secondary sales report depicting the target achievement percentage on both levels.
- The health shop domain of Qarshi has been mapped as ‘spot sellers’ in TMX-SD and hence all of the activities, inventory and sales of health shops can be monitored now.
Sales Audit via TMX-SD
Qarshi’s sales audit operations have also been mapped in TMX-SD as Work With surveys. This feature covers the entire process of sales audit including monitoring retailer’s stock, scoring, managing post-survey tasks, capturing competitor information and evaluating market shares.
Tertiary sales (shop offtake)
One of the main requirements from Qarshi’s higher management was to monitor retailer’s offtake. This was a real challenge for the Qarshi team as proper records of retailer’s inventory could not be kept through the manual system. TMX-SD provides accurate reporting of tertiary sales using the retailer’s previous and current stock (stored in system) and retailer’s previous sales order. Thus the concept of tertiary sales monitoring has been implemented in Qarshi after executing operations via TMX-SD.
TMX-SD and SAP ERP integration for Qarshi
Qarshi Secondary Sales Implementation consists of two parts – Primary and Secondary Sales. Primary Sales is managed within SAP and TMX-SD covers Secondary Sales. For Qarshi Industries (Pvt.) Ltd. to effectively carry operations from Primary to Secondary Sales, certain Integration points were identified to help automate the data population from SAP to TMX and vice versa. These integration points include: Purchase Order from Distributor to Qarshi, Stock Transfer from Qarshi to Distributor, Stock Returns from Distributor to Qarshi, Master Data Update, Expenses, Incentives and Receivables from Distributor to Qarshi.
Analytic Dashboards
TMX-SD has provided supervisor dashboards to Qarshi which has made it easier for higher management to monitor sales activities. These dashboards show a whole range of Key Performance Indicators including sales based on locations, top selling brands, most efficient field agents etc.