Reimagining Distribution by Ankur Saigal of Capillary Tech

Ankur Saigal, Chief Revenue Officer, Capillary Technologies,  discusses aspects of distribution with us in this interaction.

Please share brief on Capillary CGP offering

Following our success in Retail Market, we recently launched Channel Advantage Solution extending our offerings to CPG and MFG industry. The solution focuses on making the Distribution Channels more effective through variety of solutions revolving around Engagement and Loyalty of the Channel partners (Distributors, Retailers and Influencers) supported by a B2B ordering platform.

Channel Engagement and Loyalty modules helps manufacturers optimise their trade promotions with a personalised and on-time campaigns and rewards for the channel partners. A typical target manufacturer for this is one which relies heavily on multi-brand distribution channel or where the influencers (painters, masons, mechanics, pharmacists etc) play a major role in final purchase.

The B2B ordering platform helps manufacturers to create a direct buying platform for the channel partners for anytime, anywhere orders. This solves a legacy problem in the industry where the sales representatives are responsible for taking the orders leading to stock-outs as they are not able to touch-base a lot of channel partners at the right point of time.

These 2 solutions heavily depend of data for their effectiveness. Data collection is currently limited to primary level (sales to distributors) for the Manufacturers. Through our Channel Insights product, we are enabling manufacturers to capture secondary (sales to retailers) and tertiary (sales to influencers or final customers) sales data too. This is helping manufacturers to create better and quicker decisions.

Some of the largest paints, agri-products, steel and pharma manufacturers are working with us already on the Channel Advantage Solution across India, South East Asia and Middle East.

How Capillary re-imagines Consumer Goods Distribution with Channel Advantage Solution?

Our clients for Channel Advantage Solution are seeing great results in their respective distribution channels. Here are some of the snippets on how we are optimising their channels –

1. Data Visibility- With Channel advantage we re-imagine a single view of all the channel partners available to the manufacturers on the go. A higher data collection at secondary and tertiary levels has helped them a lot of regional insights. This also helps manufacturers to build their strategies then engage based on basis of data.
2. Channel Engagement – A personalised engagement strategies will help Manufacturers to build a relationship with their channel partners and not push their products basis trade promotions only.
3. No more Stock-outs – With the availability of anytime, anywhere ordering platform, the distribution channel will always be ready to cater to the market changes and dynamics.

What is the impact of Channel Loyalty on manufacturing companies?

1. Improved ROI on Trade promotions
2. Lower dependence of trade promotions – Increased Bottom Line
3. Motivated Channel partners – Improved sales
4. Digitised Channel Management – Quick and Data-based decisions on the go

What are the new business initiative by CPG division?

MFG and CPG sub-industries differ a lot from each other in terms of how the distribution channel works. Our next steps is to make our Channel Advantage Industry agnostic.

Making Data base capture easier – We are optimising our OCR based bill data capture technologies to support multiple invoice formats.

Bring in more personalisation – Like our retail products, we are bringing our AI capabilities to the Channel Advantage solution.

Localisation – Working in multiple counties where motivation for channel partners are different, we are bringing a lot of localisationin the Rewards Catalogue feature in the solution

Any challenges in this work?

Largest challenge the comfort of the industry with the legacy systems and processes they are working with. Although our ROI focussed engagement model is helping us overcome this with our success stories.

Complexity of how the channel works in different sub-industries and countries create a challenge to customise the solution for each one of them. This is where our open API based integrations with other systems helps us. Also we are working on the most of the complex use-cases in our product roadmap.