Opportunity

A well-known automobile parts manufacturing group had various marketing schemes charted for dealers, retailers, and the end customer. The schemes were launched, and the stakeholders were informed through the sales team by word of mouth and email. The budgets for the schemes were to be mapped with expenses. The incentives were paid out in cash by the sales teams to their dealers and retailers so that the money could reach the right people in the chain on time and in full. Reconciliation and mapping cash expenditures emerged as significant issues.

Solution

Concerns were raised about developing this process in the ERP due to its accessibility to a wide range of personnel. We proposed an ecosystem separate from the ERP but integrated with it. That took care of having a large number of people be a part of the ecosystem and, at the same time, kept the main ERP secure.

The ecosystem allowed the marketing team to create and design schemes; the finance folks to allocate budgets and review their spending; and the dealers, retailers, and final customers to claim and redeem incentives online and in real-time. Payment gateways were aligned for immediate payments of incentives from the company’s end. The solution shook the entire system because it not only enabled digital money flow, real-time tracking of budgets and spending, zero value leakages, and automatic reconciliations but also created brand value among customers by providing clear, quick, and velocity incentives.

Owning the final customer became possible; the tapping of secondary markets took place, and spurious products could be identified.

This solution gave way to an integrated system that included inventory management, order-taking, fulfilment, and customer service.