Rethinking fast moving consumer goods merchandising

For many fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies some of their biggest merchandising challenges include manual data collection using pen and paper, inaccurate sales data, sales team not visiting outlets as required and late sales reports. This leads to low quality market reports for FMCG companies which cannot be used to make effective decisions leading to lost revenue.

Developed by TrendPro Systems Ltd - a local tech start-up focussed on delivering brilliant and cost-effective ICT solutions to Kenyan companies, the platform, SaapCRM, provides real-time sales data collection and analytics for FMCG companies.

SaapCRM which stands for sales-app CRM, was developed in 2014 after the TrendPro team realised the major pain point of the current manual merchandising processes.

One of the key features of SaapCRM is sales data collection automation which has been made as simple as possible to make the app easy to use. A field employee logs into the app, s/he fills in a dynamically populated form to capture data and then submits. It is as simple as that and really hassle free for users. The submitted data is available in real-time on the back-office reports for the managers to act on.

Another crucial feature of the app is enabling retail census. With GPS technology, you can know where your outlets are, which outlet is selling your products and which sales agent has visited the outlet and at what time. Using state-of-art technology, SaapCRM allows for comprehensive mapping of outlets, capturing GPS coordinates of the outlet, a picture of the outlet among other crucial characteristics. This effectively makes the FMCG company aware of its products visibility in the market.

Given the problem of sales teams not reporting to outlets and also cooking data, with the tracking feature, SaapCRM allows the manager to know where the field agents are at any one given moment during working hours and the manager can pinpoint the field employees on a map at the platforms back-end hence increasing accountability.

Raw data isn’t that useful if it cannot be converted into information fast enough, and that is where SaapCRM analytics comes into place. SaapCRM provides rich real-time analytics tools, like data summaries, graphical data presentation, exporting to excel and report generation. These tools allows managers to get a quick glance of the product performance and distribution in the market under focus. These analytics can lead to useful market insights given the high-quality and reliability of SaapCRM reports.

With SaapCRM's ability to enforce sales team's activities accurately, it lowers merchandising expenses for FMCG companies. With real-time data analytics, SaapCRM provides an efficient and convenient way of generating market reports, giving managers an edge.

It is also a cost effective solution because it supports multiple products simultaneously. In conclusion, SaapCRM is a top-notch economical solution to the long-standing merchandising challenges for FMCG companies.