At present scenario in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) when multinational biggies are struggling with slowdown in sales and dipping revenues, one of the swadeshi herbal and ayurvedic brand is multiplying its revenue day by day. This swadeshi brand started couple of decades before but the way it has positioned its self has consternated its competitors and revived an ancient old segment of “Ayurveda”. There are various factors behind the success of this brand but its supply chain and sales and distribution strategy is the back bone of this impressive success.
I have tried to delve deeper myself to understand its supply chain and distribution strategy. In April 2012 it has officially announced its entry into the retail sector by launching 100 products to be expanded up to 800, including bodycare, healthcare, digestive, cosmetics, toiletries and others products. The national and multinational FMCG brands playing in this fast growing more than 1 trillion $ Indian market have started facing intimidation from home grown and an absolutely swadeshi competitor.
It has designed its supply chain by keeping three points in priority like:- Quality product
- Wider availability
- Cheaper price
- Its products sell through its own outlets available across the length and breadth of the country, each outlets sends its demand to central office at Haridwar and then based on the demand, different products are gathered from its various units and then items are delivered to the respective outlet through their own transport
- Another wonderful example is they collect cow urine from rural house hold of small villages and then after initial filteration it is sent to its food and herbal park for further processing and then to its various outlets
- The mega food park has been envisaged to help in creation of enabling infrastructure for food processing and a comprehensive ‘farm -to-plate’ supply chain system. This initiative aims to minimize cost and setting smooth supply flow by backward and forward integration between farmers, factory and market
- Sells products through its own widespread outlets
- Sells through its Chikitsalaya and Arogya kendr
- Sells through big retail chains like BigBazaar, reliance fresh and small mom and pop stores
- Sell online through its own e-commerce portal and other online retail platforms like www.bigbasket.com
- Its herbal products are also available at post offices across the country
- A shop is established for sale of products wherever a yoga camp is organized
- Also appoint distributors across the country and appointed already appointed 20000 distributors
Designing and setting up this mammoth supply chain and sales and distribution channel in couple of years is definitely a learning lesson for all of us. But still for most of the processes the company majorly depend on traditional methods like retail execution, order processing, demand planning, inventory management and warehouse management and facing challenges like:
- Delay in time-to-market
- Not having proper visibility of available stock
- Lack of proper visibility of retail sales
- Assumption based demand planning
- Long replenishment cycle
- Delay in payment recovery cycle
- Painful return and replacement
FForce is perfect solution in this scenario because it has specially designed to cater modern supply chain and sales and distribution need easy and ready to deploy web based solution.