On-field sales representatives of a leading agriculture company can now use a mobile app to capture stock position at each point in the distribution chain and handle the demand-supply of their products better.
On-field sales representatives of a leading agriculture company can now use a mobile app to capture stock position at each point in the distribution chain and handle the demand-supply of their products better.
Our client, a global biotechnology company, supplied products in remote districts through their logistics partner or their own representatives. Often, the number of orders placed from a particular retailer would exceed the available stock. In such a scenario, sales representatives would need to get in touch with the nearest dealers within their area or outside of it, and check if they could supply products to fulfill the order requirement. Manually completing this task required a lot of effort and caused significant loss of time. This created the need for a platform that can reduce effort along the distribution chain and maintain a consolidated record of the inventory on a provincial level, enabling quick transit of orders.
They discussed this requirement with [x]cube team and after a detailed study of their distribution network and multiple interviews with the stakeholders involved, we proposed an app for the on-field sales team that can capture stock position at each retailer and provide updated information from a centralized repository.
Sales representatives of the company faced difficulties in handling demand requests that required transfers to and from dealers within as well as from outside their own sales territory. At the same time, the absence of updated and consolidated province-level data to keep track of stock in real-time was hampering efficiency in dealing with orders.
The idea was to have an app that can monitor inventory across different regions in real-time and make it visible to the entire sales hierarchy in the distribution chain. The idea was simple but required a granular level breakdown of requirements from the perspective of different actors in the supply chain- on-field sales representative, sales distributors, area manager, national demand manager, administrator, and even logistics partners. Our team of experts, with a skill for attention to details and passion for problem-solving, formulated a high-level plan for covering every requirement and mapped them against the most optimal features to deliver a solution that met client expectations and made stock monitoring and movement for sales representatives effortless.
We delivered an app where sales representatives can monitor stock levels across various retailers and raise transfer requests whenever needed. They can create and update requests and monitor the transits in real-time. Access to various features was based on user roles such as sales representative, distributor, area manager, national demand manager and super administrator. The technologies used were Xamarin Android, Xamarin iOS, Microsoft Azure.
As soon as the barcode is scanned, the application records the following details:
The app successfully resolved the challenges and helped the sales team leverage the readily available information to coordinate better with the retailers in terms of inventory management. This has also helped them in creating strategies to ensure better stock tracking and movement ever since.
