Distribution & Trade

Sales coordinators manually process hundreds of distributor orders daily — checking stock, verifying credit limits, confirming orders, and initiating dispatch. This creates delays and errors, especially during peak season.

Trade schemes — free goods, percentage discounts, cash discounts, combo offers — are manually applied by the billing team, leading to missed schemes, incorrect application, and distributor disputes.

Primary sales to distributors are visible but what distributors actually sell to trade is largely opaque, making demand sensing, distributor health assessment, and promotional effectiveness measurement unreliable.

Field sales reps are assigned beat plans — routes covering specific outlets each day — but compliance is rarely tracked. Non-compliance reduces market coverage and is only discovered during audits.

Trade marketing teams spend significant budget on schemes and promotions but have no structured way to measure whether a scheme delivered incremental sales or merely subsidised existing purchases.

Extending credit beyond approved limits creates financial exposure. Without a real-time system check at the order stage, credit limits are breached repeatedly and the risk is only flagged by finance at month-end.

Schemes with specific eligibility criteria — minimum order quantities, product mix requirements, geographic restrictions — are applied incorrectly when done manually, either giving benefits to non-eligible distributors or missing eligible ones.

Mismatches between what the company sold to distributors (primary) and what distributors sold to trade (secondary) indicate unhealthy stock piling or distribution failures, but these are hard to detect without reconciliation.

ASMs and sales reps conduct market visits and competitor audits, but findings are reported verbally or through unstructured WhatsApp messages, making the insights difficult to aggregate and act on.

Distributor performance is reviewed informally in quarterly meetings using manually compiled data. There is no systematic way to rank distributors, identify underperformers, or make territory realignment decisions based on objective data.