Distributor management system has become an integral part of the FMCG & Consumer Goods industry to drive efficiency and productivity in the dealer/distributor landscape. Every FMCG company deals with thousands of distributors, who deal with millions of retailers spread across a vast geographical area. It can be a challenging task to maintain transparent dealings and obtain insights about secondary sales with obsolete ways of maintaining and transferring data. With evolving technology, integration of Distributor Management System has become of vital importance for inventory management, getting complete visibility on secondary sales execution and insights about trade offers and schemes.
Importance of Distributor Management System in FMCG
Strategic management of supply chain is essential for consumer goods companies to ensure optimal market expansion as well as to build long-term relationships with the distributors. An distributor management system helps manage every stage of the supply chain to add greater value to a business in it’s route to market. Moreover, it is a significant necessity for FMCG companies due to the following reasons;
- Secondary Sales Visibility: Visibility of actual secondary sales execution is fundamental to knowing exactly what the status of sales execution is, and it also provides input to various strategies such as store level investments, team performance and also effectiveness of trade schemes.
- Reduction of Pilferage: Better inventory management with distributor management system helps companies to reduce costs on pilferage and also on working capital in case of overstocking.
- Optimal utilization of schemes and offers: Complete visibility of secondary sales data provides insights on the utilization of offers and schemes by distributors. As the data is integrated in real time, companies can take quick actions if the offers and schemes are not being applied by the distributors.
- Integrate business operations: As DMS provides a centralized and common platform of communication for distributors, and the company, it bridges the communication gaps and integrates all the business operations in a single platform.
- Enhance distributor experience: DMS provides organized order management and automated claims and reward management, enhancing the distributor’s experience and thereby ensuring long-term relationships.
Core Challenges Associated with Current Distributor Landscape
One of the biggest challenges for FMCG companies while introducing a distributor management system to their distributors is that they are reluctant to adopt a DMS software, since they typically deal with products from multiple brands. To add to that, most distributors prefer using conventional tally or excel for reporting secondary sales to companies.
Let’s take a closer look into the challenges to infer solutions.
- Multiple DMS for multiple brands: A distributor deals with multiple brands in his business. If he starts to incorporate a separate DMS software for each brand, he will have to spend time and human resources managing them. This definitely will be time-consuming and laborious for the distributors.
- Using conventional tools: While this process is more convenient to the distributors to update and maintain data of every brand in a single system like tally or excel, it incurs the cost of time for companies as they have to wait for days to get the data and act on the insights.
- Inability of distributors to allocate resources: Small distributors may not have the resources to set up a workstation and a human resource just to maintain a DMS.
The solution to these problems lies in deployment of a Hybrid-DMS Software which caters to the versatile requirements of the distributor landscape. Take for a situation where a distributor is using tally or excel to account for secondary sales data, a simple tally plugging can help brands pickup the required secondary sales data without any interference to the distributor.
Guide to Choose your Best Distributor Management System
As there are several FMCG distributor management system providers in the market, it can be tricky for you to choose the best DMS that actually helps you manage your supply chain based on distribution nuances. Here’s a step wise guide for choosing the best distributor management system for your business.
- Assess your distributor and retail landscape: It is important to choose a DMS based on the parameter of problems areas in retail landscape visibility and complete visibility of DSR activities. If you have distributors spread in different corners of your state or country, you must choose a DMS that provides cloud integration.
- Ease of Use: A DMS must not be too complicated for the use of distributors. You must keep in mind the ease of deployment and use when choosing a DMS. A web-based or mobile DMS software proves effective.
- Assess adoption issues: Adoption issues such as integrating DMS for multiple brands, distributors determined to use existing practices of data entry and lack of resources for adopting DMS should be addressed while choosing a DMS for your business. Additionally, you must look into the DMS features so that you can be sure that it fits well with your current distributor landscape.
- Take Free Demos and check Online Reviews: Demos help see the platform live in action and check the fitment specific to your brand requirements. Once you’ve made up your mind about a particular DMS software, do not purchase it until you can view some positive reviews or case studies of that DMS online.
If you have been looking for an ideal DMS, BeatRoute can be one such platform that can drive efficiency and growth to your supply chain management. With Beat Route’s easy-to-use DMS, you enjoy the following advantages.
- Hybrid DMS: Web-based, Light-mobile along with Tally plugin to eliminate adoption challenges
- WhatsApp BOT to enhance distributor experience by simplifying order management through WhatsApp
- Complete visibility of secondary sales execution in real time
- Insights about offers and schemes
- Seamless integration with your SFA and ERP software for true upstream and downstream data management
BeatRoute is a web-based DMS and thus distributors do not need to download separate applications as it synchronizes the real time data as soon as the internet is connected. Alternatively, distributors have the option of using our light mobile DMS if they want to avoid investment in workstations and human resource.
Conclusion
FMCG Distributor Management System is a powerful tool that helps companies to focus on strategizing for business growth rather than spending hours to manage the supply chain. Moreover, a DMS provides important insights about inventory, secondary sales, performance of distributors, response to offers and schemes etc. which aids essential decision making in the companies. BeatRoute provides a hybrid DMS along with Goal-Driven SFA Platform that enables FMCG & Consumer Goods companies to enjoy an end-to-end solution for the sales and supply chain management.