Governance & Compliance Characteristics in Unorganized Retail Sales Context
- Anupam Ahluwalia
In one of my previous blogs, I introduced my learning in form of cascading layers of characteristics a field automation solution must possess in unorganized retail based selling context – URC (e.g. via distribution network).
For sake of continuity, let me reproduce the cascading layers as below:
I also promised to analyze each of the layers in a bit more detail so as to highlight how exactly appropriate use of relevant features in each of these may make a substantial value difference to your field operations.
In this blog, I have put down my thoughts on Compliance & Governance aspects relevant for URC.
Compliance and Governance
At the most basic level, your SFA solution must enable complete governance, compliance and monitoring capabilities for managing your field operations. This roughly translates into following categories of feature sets:
This relates to creating organization wide policies that disseminate to your field workforce via your solution. E.g. define beat plan, geographical org. hierarchy, frequency of event reporting policies, importance definition of counters/retailers and markets defined in terms of frequency of visit, set rules for timelines for handling field cases etc.
This refers to the ability of your system to track compliance and auto alert in case of breaches. E.g. System ability to alert on deviations to scheduled beat plan, missed cases for action, exceptional data reporting, for example system determined faulty prices/orders etc
This refers to ability to monitor on demand, as real time as possible for officers who are responsible for their respective regions. E.g. Being able to view distance travelled by any field person, route travelled, counters visited, performance against set metrics & policies etc.
In summary:
Ability to define policies and procedures
There are no field operations without some sort of policies and procedures defined. The challenge for your solution approach is to ensure that there are digital means of defining such policies and, where possible, ensure compliance via preventive means rather than reactive alerting in case of breaches.
Following provides some dimensions of policies and procedures that can be defined via digital means:
A basic tenet is that field staff must be restricted to carry out operations, access processes only for those aspects that they have mandate for as per the organization hierarchy. For example, a North Zone manager must be able to control all aspects of process instances that occur within North Zone, but must have no access to other zones not in his mandate.
Location hierarchy differ from organization hierarchy in that there can be field personnel who are authorized for differing roles in multiple locations. This is especially relevant because options available to him at the time of performing operational tasks must auto enable access to such hierarchy locations. For example, ‘A’ reports to M1 who controls just L1, but ‘A’ performs product demo roles in locations L1 and L2.
It must be possible to allocate specialized roles and auto enable such roles for individuals. For example, ‘A’ can carry out recording field cases, providing promotion material but not taking Sales Orders.
It must be possible to define frequency of reports, visits based on importance of retailer/customers. For example, a bulk retailer who is a star performer must be rewarded with higher visit frequency than let’s say another retailer whose volumes and accessibility may not justify costs for high frequency in person visits.
Sometimes certain policies require that within a stipulated timeframe certain actions to be completed every day or week. In such case the system must be capable of recognizing breaches in advance and raising alerts. For example- define a case type and a centrally defined limit for by when it must be processed.
Scheduling is one of the most complex subjects for policies where multiple aspects like advance planning for visit locations, right set of target visits based on importance of customers to be visited, frequency determination based on already completed visits, optimum route etc should be taken into account. The system should provide means for defining rules that enable such intelligent scheduling.
There should be a way of enforcing limits such as individual not able to record customer order beyond the available credit limit, usually synchronized with backend ERP such as SAP etc.
Often, for use cases like consumer surveys, it should be possible to define differences such as questions to be asked depending on consumer type, possible options list etc.
The system should possess capability for automated enforcement via defined rules & customizations. As a thumb rule, more such policies that can be digitized, higher the value you derive by making your system do the work which otherwise would be manual & probably less productive.
Ability to track compliance
While in most cases, the policies must be enforced via the disseminated digital rules on devices at the time of performing an operation itself, some of the policies require compliance to be enforced via retrospective data analysis, but of course performed via system incorporated intelligence features without manual intervention.
Examples as below:
- Deviations to beat plan: Only after a visit is concluded (usually a day) it is possible to compute deviations to the approved beat plan.
- Missed or exceptional reporting: Only when certain events that must have been received but not received can it be determined that breaches to policies have occurred. Same is the case with exceptions that can be computed based on analytics. For example, reported market price that does not comply with trend based rules etc.
- Data related: Sometimes it’s preferred that reporting is allowed to proceed but an additional manual step added before backend processing to determine whether its accepted or not. Example: Large order- even though amount is higher than mandate, it may be preferred that there is a workflow step on the backend which allows manual intervention to accept it or not.
The key aspect of compliance tracking is that it is done in a way that:
- Is not seen as intrusive by people using the system- e.g. constantly track their location/stops throughout the day.
- Is not draining to use- the system must reduce the time spend, not big down users with cumbersome procedures and screens.
Ability to Monitor
Though it may sound similar to compliance tracking, ability to monitor in this context has a completely different meaning. I have tried to elaborate via the following examples:
- Audit history monitoring: It should be possible for users and system managers to access the audit trail of processes that occurred in the past.
- Learning from exceptions: For users, exceptions must be clarify basis on which it was raised by listing the rule breaches and thus help user to learn for future avoidance.
- Performance monitoring: It should be possible to not only track compliance for individual processes, but also possible to monitor holistically performance of a group, team etc. For example, total exception events comparison between two regions etc.
Conclusion
All solutions probably include some form of Governance and Compliance capabilities. However, the extent of automation via dissemination of policies & governance based on analytics may well make a huge difference in value you get from the system.
Usually governance & compliance in operations management is somewhat an implicit concern, but it does form a significant cost factor in any field sales operations. In this blog I have tried to highlight a few aspects. With some help from accountants but much deeper analysis of your context, it is possible to break down these into cost savings opportunities from each of the categories.