Godrej To Connect 90,000 Retailers Across India

Getting accurate and timely details of retail sales of its products would be a dream come true for any manufacturing company. All the supply chain management initiatives are often a part of efforts to connect the last and vital link of retailers. Godrej Industries Limited which started with connecting its distributors across regions has now embarked on an ambitious project of connecting 90,000 retailers across India. Mani Mulki, EVP, Information Systems, Godrej Industries spoke to Biztech2.0 on this latest initiative.

Could you explain the significance of supply chain management in your business?

Managing the supply chain is an integral part of our business operations. Sustaining the agility of our supply chain is extremely crucial and very critical. We make sure that right products are available at the right place, right time and in right quantity.

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Besides, end consumer’s behaviour has significantly changed. With a variety of products to choose from, brand loyalty is slowly fading. It’s impulse purchase which is driving the retail sales. So it is all the more important that we make sure that all our products are available at the right place and right time.

What kind of IT initiatives have been undertaken by the company to strengthen the supply chain?

About four years back, we embarked on a very ambitious and successful project called ‘Sampark’ to link all our primary distributors. We have already linked more than 1000 distributors in our supply chain. Dispatch of goods to distributors is by and large based on the concept of replenishment. This initiative has actually helped us to make our supply chain very lean and effective, leading to far lesser stock outs.

What will be the next step?

The connectivity to distributors was very successful. This initiative has actually helped us to increase the availability of products on a continuous basis. We will now connect the last segment of the supply chain - the retailer. We want to connect the huge number of retail outlets, the kirana stores that are spread all over India; however it will be an extremely challenging task.

How would you connect the retailers?

We are planning to use Windows-based PDA which would be given to field officers to collect information on sales and stocks, whenever they visit the retail outlets. At the end of the day, they would come back to the distributors’ place. The distributor will have a desktop, which will be connected with our supply chain system. Thus information would pass on, once he makes the entries in the computer.

However, what was felt prudent and far more important was to make our back end architecture more robust so that it services the distributor, supplier, and the factories at a much more efficient level. That is why, we embarked on SAP implementation, which forced us to put the PDA project on halt for a while. Since the past 15 months we were concentrating on SAP ERP. It has just gone live and is stabilising now. So we have turned back our attention to the PDA initiative which we call as Sampurna. In a couple of months, we would be piloting this initiative in the Mumbai region and based on the success we would then plan a phased roll out.

How do you plan to roll out the solution?

Initially, we plan to provide the solution to about 400 of our field force. It would be scaled latter based on the success. Our endeavour is to connect about 90,000 retailers across India, which is a mammoth task. These retailers constitute about 40 to 50% of our sales. This is a huge initiative, far more complex than connecting the distributors. We want to be very careful while rolling out the solution. We will start with a pilot at one place and make sure it succeeds before rolling it out to other places.

What kind of benefits are you expecting from this project?

We will get an invaluable insight in to the harsh market realities. Thus our ability to respond to changes in the market place would go up exponentially. Our field officer will increasingly become efficient. Currently the entire process of collecting data from the retail outlet is manual. Digitising the entire process would result in saving valuable time.