Consideraciones técnicas adicionales

 First and the foremost major gap is the Fill Rate, being on an average less than 65% calculated value wise. Fill rate is low because of unavailability of products in required quantity from the company and distributor. Fill rate is low not just value wise, but it’s the same SKU wise or line wise or case wise. Approximately fill rate should be

around 85%, keeping in mind the takeover of FEM by Dabur and the type of facilities that can be offered by the company to its this segment.

 Distributors and retailers are not keen in keeping all the registered SKUs with them in the store because of the fact that only 20% of them are fast moving, rest of them have very slow movement which leads to occupied shelf space without any sale. Of all SKUs, retailers prefer to keep only bleach category of FEM because it has a very high sale as compared to Hair Removal Cream and Hand Wash.

 While those categories which are put in the store, they are not kept in all the

variants which leads to unawareness among the consumers about other variants. In another case, there is a SKU of FEM Fairness Bleach coming in the parlour pack of 100 Gram, its demand is there in all the Big Bazaar stores but the company has stopped making 100 gram packs.

 Replenishment of FEM stock takes place with rest of the Dabur order, i.e. the same transport van is used for Dabur stock and FEM stock and if there is unavailability of FEM products, it will have to wait for the Dabur Purchase Order to be generated and with that supply comes the FEM supply. Other than this it has been observed that in some cases it took way too long for supply to take place which resulted in loss of sale and may be customer as well, since these days with so many of competitive products in the market customer generally don’t wait for the product to arrive and therefore fulfil his need with another brand offering same services. Unavailability ultimately resulting in loss of loyal customer.

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 Minimum Base Quantity is set up without any standard procedure. Moreover the same quantity is followed irrespective of the demand of that particular. Like in case of Big Bazaar discussed earlier, in which the footfall on an average is around 2400 on weekdays and around 3000 on weekends in first 10 days of the month which is 30% more than the footfall for rest of the month still the same MBQ level is followed without considering the above factor of footfall. And because of low MBQs supply falls short of demand leading to loss of sale.

 Another of the reason why Modern Trade chains avoid taking orders of all MBQs and in large quantities because it has been observed that there is a lot of loss of money and stock on account of theft and pilferage in these stores because of the modern structure of self-pick of the product whichever consumer wants. Moreover these chains concentrate more on the outlets than their warehouses which at times lead to spoilage of products stored in these warehouses.

 Purchase orders are generated on the visit of Dabur representative who comes and write the PO on a piece of paper and then take it back to the distributor. There are only 3-4 modern trade chain which send their orders through mail, rest is done through writing on the piece of paper. This makes it difficult for the sales person and can also lead to small human errors while noting down the order.

 Modern Trade chains are not satisfied with the Margin been given to them, while their expectation are around 25%, they get somewhere between 15-20%, because of low margin, the chains are not very particular about Dabur and FEM products and don’t give much importance to their sale.

 There were credit issues with one of the Chains which led to stoppage of supply of products to that particular chain. Relationship was spoiled between the company and the chain. While the issue was still not resolved, both the parties already had a loss because of this issue.

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 Lack of awareness among distributors and retailers about the SKUs being made by the company. In a conversation with Vijay Aggarwal who is the owner of Vijman India, he told me that he himself was not aware of the Hand Wash SKU coming in 5 litre pack and when asked the reason behind it, he said there was no communication from the company regarding the same. Similarly while interviewing one of the retailers; he said there was no communication regarding the schemes from the company. This means there has been constant communication gap between the company and the distributors and retailers.

 In some cases, sale representative tried to push the product to the retails chain because they themselves were working on target based sales. These are always realistic goals but the stress in on an improvement over past performance. This led to overburdening the retailer with the stock and releasing the pressure their own shoulders.

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