Reaching the next million customers – What’s in store for Manufacturing Companies?

Manufacturing organizations aiming to reach the next million customers need to access the potential that emerging markets offer.

The primary channel to sell in these markets is indirect. This channel enables inventory break-bulk, working capital requirements, last-mile delivery, and various other benefits that would nearly be impossible for the manufacturing organization to provide at scale themselves.

This indirect channel brings its own set of unique challenges, such as working with non-exclusive distributors as well as dealing with manual operations in the value chain. The lack of visibility to distributor sales and inventory results in poor supply chain planning and execution, leading to “unfulfilled demand,” frequent “out-of-stock,” “low market reach,” and even “loss of revenue.”

This requires a cloud-agnostic demand sensing solution combined with a robust mobile ordering engine that can enable large manufacturing organizations to overcome these challenges and attain a strong hold in emerging markets.

For non-exclusive partners, a data exchange would be required to connect the organization to its channel partners and capture the partner sales inventory data irrespective of the file formats and ERP systems they might be using. If required, this data is then harmonized and transformed to match the organization’s hierarchy.

For exclusive distributors, a cloud-based order shipping and billing solution is essential to capture data in real-time and enable insight-driven supply chain decisions.

Lastly, for those retailers based in remote locations and not served by a distributor, a lightweight mobile app to capture orders, thus enabling non-linear market coverage.

We have built all these capabilities at EdgeVerve and have helped deliver some powerful benefits to our clients such as:

Our solution is trusted by 25+ Fortune 500 companies and is enabling visibility to $100bn+ annual revenue, connecting these companies with 6000+ distributors and 5mn+ retail outlets. With a presence in over 130 countries, our solution is available in 6 languages.

Learn more about our TradeEdge platform.