Why Distributor Management?
You have a large distribution network and just want to work out how much of your performance is down to Distributor?
It may sound simple, but Distributor performance monitoring is not simply a function of Demand and margins. Often quality of your Distribution network is the difference between acceptable performance and superlative one.
In a dynamic market where prices and demand are going up, it is not simply about getting higher demand, better prices, but about ensuring your relative price increase or relative demand increase comes with an improvement in market share. On the other hand, in a failing market, ability to sustain prices or demand better than your competitors may be crucial, traditional metrics that simply report falling prices or demand would hide the quality of your distribution chain.
Proactive Distributor management thus is a crucial, revenue influencing function that has a long term impact on your bottom line and your insurance to deal with vagaries of a dynamic market.
Issues with Distributor Management
Proactive Distributor management requires several issues to be covered including the following:
- Micro Market Sensitivity with Big picture: Often issue identification happens via the big picture, for example, falling average price or reduction in overall cumulative demand. This leads to analysis with drill down to specific points of concern. Hence Distributor Management must not only be able to provide a micro market picture, but also a big picture that leads to analysis identifying points of concern in the distribution chain.
- Information quality based assessment: Distribution partners are extended arms of your organization. It is but obvious that quality, frequency and accuracy of information provided is crucial to successful operation. Hence an aspect of Distribution chain management is proactive monitoring of quality, frequency and accuracy of information reported from distribution chain. Hence any system must address the information reporting by itself as a crucial function to monitor and not only the content of information.
- Relative Assessment: Some of the aspects for Distributor performance assessment require not only absolute data assessment, but relative data. For example, price increase in % terms in comparison to competitor in the same market. Without an ability to perform analysis at this level, a true assessment of Distribution Chain performance is not possible.
- Horizontal Assessment: Horizontal assessment refers to comparing different micro markets based distribution chain on a single level. For example, in scenarios of promotion run on multiple micro markets simultaneously, distributor performance assessment can be effectively made only if micro markets distributors can be compared side by side.
- Proactive alerting: In most cases, retrospective information of who failed to report what information, or reported with errors is too late to take corrective actions. Thus a system that provides features for proactive, automated system generated alerting for anomalies is an important aspect for distribution chain monitoring.
Our Solution
Our Solution Outreach addresses each of the issues with Distributor Management effectively as the notes below describe.
Comparative Analysis as a tool:- Since Outreach enables comparative analysis of different kind of prices, demand forecasts for different distributors on a single graph, it serves as a powerful tool to assess Distributor performance in a market neutral way. For example, the trend differences in price and demand can be compared on a single graph.
- Since Outreach enables analysis of relative price movement in different micro markets in comparison to competitor brands, it delivers unparalleled insight into distributor performance, for example, distributors who have closed gap with brand leader whereas others have not been able to maintain price levels in comparison to competitors.
- Outreach has a number of proactive alerting features that allow for alerts to be raised where trends in prices or demand forecasts warrant attention, enabling a proactive approach to managing negative impact.