Finding opportunities for growth in a mature market is always challenging. Doing so in one of the most concentrated grocery sectors of the world is even more so.
When a leading global Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company wanted to acquire new customers, and drive additional growth with their existing customers, they approached Market Motion to help make their sales and delivery teams more efficient and effective. With an in-depth understanding of the market, Market Motion was able to offer them a solution to meet their objectives and increase their profitability.
The Challenge
Marginal sales growth and increasing third-party logistic service costs were resulting in low-profit for the FMCG company.
Sales territories and call centre schedules for 35 sales personnel vehicles and 28 delivery trucks were being manually created, resulting in inefficiencies and uneven distribution of workload. This meant that sales resources were not being optimally deployed to focus on the areas of highest sales opportunities.
Alongside of this, the company was also receiving poor customer engagement scores, highlighting ongoing problems relating to their on-time delivery performance and hasty deliveries.
The Solution
In consultation with the company, Market Motion undertook a detailed, one-month national time and motion study, across 730 outlets, to identify value-add and non-value-add activities being performed by sales personnel and delivery drivers.
They then worked with key stakeholders to understand the seasonality of the business, as well as undertaking additional analysis, before developing a tailored customer service model to lift customer engagement and better deploy resources across the country.
Market Motion recommended the implementation of Omitracs Roadnet® Transportation Suite as an end to end platform to meet all the call centre scheduling, sales territories and routing needs of the company.
Market Motion helped the company deploy the solution including training users on Territory Planner®, Roadnet® and the Roadnet Info Centre®. This meant that routing work could be completed in-house, rather than via a third-party operator – saving the company money and allowing them to more closely align their actions to their operational strategy. Training enables the business to directly optimise confirmed deliveries onto preferred driver routes with consideration for traffic congestion patterns, distance, customer service time and fatigue breaks.
Sales territories and routes have now been strategically re-routed to optimise work load for growth. Call centre schedules are also optimised, while balancing the needs of the supply chain to manage operational costs and productivity.
To drive efficiencies, Market Motion helped develop business rules for sales and delivery teams. This gives guidance to individual workers and ensures effective and efficient use of time to deliver increased value to the business and customer.
The Results
The new solution allows more time for selling, in-store execution and business development for improved planning.
Customer satisfaction levels have risen, resulting from improved on-time performance and delivery effectiveness plans.
The business has seen an 8% improvement in transport costs compared to the costs of the third-party logistics company, and an overall improvement in cost to service.
Additional strategic improvements also identified for action in the future.
