How KAO Optimizes 70% Sales Data Input Process

After 27 years of establishment and development in the personal care and cleaning product industry, KAO Vietnam, a subsidiary of Japan-based KAO Group, is increasingly promoting its presence in the Vietnamese market.

Owning over 170 direct selling points nationwide, KAO offers numerous product categories. KAO’s business structure includes many departments from back office teams such as Marketing, Administration, and Human Resources to the Business division such as Sales, Field, etc.

One of the important strategies to help brands succeed in boosting sales and increasing brand awareness is applying trade promotion strategy.

KAO said the business has assigned 160 promoters or PGs at the point of sale to introduce and promote the products to consumers. To optimize the process of collecting input data for sell-in/out reports and inventory, KAO looked for a digital solution and chose FieldCheck to help businesses remove barriers caused by traditional methods, saving data collection and processing time.

Hopefully, KAO's success story shared by Ms. My, Assistant Manager, and Ms. Trang, Senior Data Analyst at KAO, will inspire other retailers in Vietnam seeking a solution to optimize their operation management.

FieldCheck representative: Good morning, Ms. My and Ms. Trang. It is nice to meet you today. To start our interview, could you please share a little bit about your PG management?

My: Nice to meet you too. About PG management, we are currently responsible for managing data reported from more than 160 PGs. When starting the project, based on the planned budget, I will choose the top stores to direct PGs to work on there. I am also responsible for setting KPI schemes for PG and making a proposal in Excel for the higher-level personnels to approve, then share this excel file with PGs.

My team will manage the data reported from PG such as sell-in/out reports, inventory reports while the evaluation of PG's performance will be decided by the sales department.

FieldCheck representative: So when you have to manage such a large number of PGs, how can you compile reports to send to stakeholders? Can you share the information for the regular report where and by what method?

My: Sell-in and inventory reports will be done weekly, and sell-out reports are sent daily. Based on sell-in data and inventory data collected, our team will calculate out automatically, and cross check with internal sell-in to see if the reports are correct. 

The process of handling sell-in/out and inventory report data is very time consuming because it has to be handled manually using Excel spreadsheets. The introduction of Excel in this task takes a lot of time and errors, so I want a system that I can get data needed quickly and all stakeholders can log in easily to download data.

The main job of my team will be to process report data from PGs, then compare with internal departments to give the final report results to send to key accounts and PG leaders for comparison.

FieldCheck representative: How does KAO directly visit the points of sale to check the working process of PG?

My: In this regard, the sales department will be the one to directly evaluate the work results of PG. As far as I know, the sales team will now create a checklist on the Excel spreadsheet to evaluate the performance of the PGs and the quality of the POSM. Currently, the departments have not yet agreed on the standards when evaluating PGs. That said, as before starting work, the PGs have been thoroughly trained and also worked for a long time, the quality of work of KAO's PGs is stable.

FieldCheck representative: So how do you calculate the incentive for PGs based on what standards and with which tools?

My: Currently, the company calculates monthly bonuses based on sales, while PG's working style and consulting quality criteria will be calculated quarterly and annually. Regarding the tool to generate the incentive report, the team still utilizes Excel spreadsheets to calculate as there are many criteria related to many departments, which poses various difficulties in management.

FieldCheck representative: How do you evaluate the current work management method?

My: Because the calculation of incentives for employees is based on sales and involves many other departments such as trade marketing, key accounts, to get the final incentive result, it is necessary to go through many steps of re-evaluation by many stakeholders.

Excel spreadsheets cannot show detailed information about data, so it sometimes takes time to compare and summarize data. In the past, the input data was often entered manually, so the office department had to wait for the PG leaders to compile before it could perform the next work.

Now, thanks to using FieldCheck, my team can actively access the system to load input data quickly without depending much on the reports from the PG leaders anymore.

Previously, the team had to wait one week to compile input data and 2 weeks to process and do comparison with PGs, consuming a total of 3 weeks. Now the time for the whole process reduces to only 1 week, equivalent to a reduction of nearly 70% of work execution time.

FieldCheck representative: So how do you evaluate the use of digital solutions in your work management?

My: The software helps a lot in the work. As all tasks are automated, the processing time is faster. Currently, KAO utilizes 50% digital solutions and 50% manual operations.

Currently, FieldCheck helps to cut the time to get input data by about 70%. It can be seen that the application of solutions helps to optimize the processing time of jobs, helping to streamline the operations.

In the near future, KAO plans to digitize 80% of operations, reducing the percentage of manual work to 20% to help operations go faster with better results.

FieldCheck representative: So can you tell us your impression after using FieldCheck?

My: Currently, KAO is applying FieldCheck in generating sell-in/out reports and inventory data from PGs. Thanks to the report data being all updated on the system, the team can actively upload to the system to download data for processing. Such initiative helps KAO save nearly 70% of time, as I mentioned above.

Using FieldCheck helps KAO know exactly the check-in/out time of each PG at the point of sale. It also becomes easier to check and track PG's work as all PG activities are recorded real-time on the system. 

Due to the nature of PG's work at KAO, the features of PG attendance management, incentive calculation or store audits have not been fully applied by mobile checklists. As  mentioned above, KAO plans to digitize about 80% of KAO's operations. In the coming time, we will gradually switch to using digital solutions for attendance and incentive summary generation by software to save time and streamline management processes.