The Nigerian consumer products distribution space is changing rapidly due to increasing expectations and changing customer/retailers’ needs. Engaging at the retail points to ensure product availability, right pricing, product display, brand visibility and building the right relationships with retailers has become paramount for brands especially FMCGs to ensure a competitive edge.
Field Force Automation (FFA) is essentially using technology solutions and platforms to automate the routines of the field team to ensure optimum engagement at retail, such as planning and scheduling visits, information sharing, capturing the routines of a visit, order taking, customer database management, customer tracking, and the tracking of field representatives.
Traditionally, FMCGs including pharmaceutical companies relied on an analog, heavily human-dependent field service network for their sales and retail customer engagement process. The human angle remains but technology is now helping in automating the routines that the field teams have to do.
Companies are beginning to adopt innovative digital enterprise solutions to manage their business operations through automation. This is where field force management automation platforms come in.
A great example of this is FieldMaxPro, a digital field force management automation solution developed by Papyrus Digital Solutions Ltd. With over 9 years in operation, Papyrus Digital Solution has deployed FieldMaxPro to various organizations across the FMCG space including food and beverage as well as pharmaceutical companies. Enabling such companies to automate the routines of their field teams’ work as well as giving management unique insights into field operations that enable them to make informed decisions and follow the progress of their teams as they engage at retail.
WHAT DOES FIELDMAXPRO DO?
FieldMaxPro helps organizations with field teams maximize the full potential of their field operations through automated tracking, planning, reporting, and verification of field engagements especially at retail. The software gives a comprehensive view of the field team’s activities when engaging customers at the retail level. It allows field officers and managers to report and track important data like the value and quantity of products available in real time. It also has a map feature that gives a spatial view of customers locations thereby helping brands visualize their points of interest from the app and dashboard.
WHO CAN USE THIS SOFTWARE?
The FieldMaxPro software is best suited for all organizations that have field teams. Field teams can be focused on different things like selling, merchandising, carrying out surveys or Detailing as is the case for pharmaceutical companies.
Irrespective of the specific vertical, the commonality they all share is a need to have representatives who engage the distribution chain especially retailers to ensure that their products are available at retail at the right price, displayed visibly and prominent especially compared to tier competition. They also have a need to develop and maintain a relationship with those retailers and track all their engagements and sales and activities with the retailers. They also have a need to have the brand visible at these points and ensure that the investments being made on merchandising materials are utilized appropriately.
All such organizations benefit immensely from having a field force automation system that helps with planning, tracking, executing, recording, and giving insights into all field activities.
WHAT ARE SOME FEATURES THAT SET FIELDMAXPRO APART?
Fieldmaxpro combines the features of a field force management automation system, with that of a customer relationship management software (CRM) making it more versatile than many of its competing software. Below are some of the features that make it stand out:
GEO-LOCATION AND POINTS OF INTEREST CLASSIFICATION:
With this feature, the location and GPS coordinates of every customer along the distribution chain down to retail are automatically registered and classified during data capture as points of interest for the organization. This makes it easy to track where field reps are engaging, where customers are, and when they are being engaged. All collated points of interest can then be viewed spatially from the dashboard on a map. Each point of interest is backed up with an actual image of the location.
REALTIME TRACKING:
The FieldMaxPro software shows information like total sales, target sales, active fields staff/non-active field staff, visits and exceptions live from the field. Being able to track this important data enables management to make quick and informed decisions. With the FieldMaxPro software, organizations can:
- Track product availability at points of interest
- Track competitors products at the same time
- Track the product pricing at all levels. Same for competitors
- Track where products are purchased from by each level.
HISTORICAL REVIEW:
The historical review feature helps field managers plan better. It gives an analytical glimpse of historical data on products and outlets’ performance over time. Thereby providing adequate useful information to help managers prioritize the right products and outlets.
OUTLETS MANAGEMENT
Our outlet management allows you to create, geocode and manage your outlets. With maps showing you exactly where your customers are.
VISITS MANAGEMENT
Manage field reps visits and schedules. View reporting on who your reps are visiting what time and where. You can also use our automated scheduling
INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
This ensures that your reps can only report sales on products assigned to them. You can also manage distributor inventory.
ORDERS & SALES MANAGEMENT
Place orders, finalise them into sales, perform pre-selling. This allows you to gather and report data about your reps sales activities.
VISIBILITY EVALUATION
This helps you collect and report on the visibility of your brand in the market. It also allows you to manage the distribution of materials.
CONTACTS MANAGEMENT
This feature helps you to manage your contacts in each of your customer outlets. This ensures your rep has a record of each person to interact with.
MEDICAL DETAILING FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES
For a pharmaceutical field rep, the medical detailing is the most important feature. This feature covers end-to-end the things required to detail in pharmaceuticals.
IMAGE CAPTURE OF POINTS OF INTEREST
They say a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Our image capture features allows your rep to give you image or video feedback of their visit activities.
FIELDMAXPRO DASHBOARD
The dashboard for FieldMaxPro is perhaps the most important Business intelligence tool the management of any organization will need as it distills the data from all the field engagements and presents them in a format that enables easy interpretation of critical insights.
Best of all is the ability to slice and dice the information in any way you might need it.
Examples will be to see information by location and geography, by outlet type classification, by sales person or teams, by date or range of date etc.
This is a tool worth exploring by any organization that has a field team and want to arm them with tools to make their work and reporting a lot more efficient while building institutional knowledge and database for all your customers in your distribution chain especially at retail and arming management with insights from data adhered from the field as your representatives enae your customers at retail.
You can check out FieldMaxPro on www.fieldmaxpro.com
