Field visit to the retail stores is key to increasing sales for FMCG and the distribution-driven Industry. A Beat Plan or Permanent Journey Plan ensures timely and regular visit to retail stores by sales executives. These regular visits help salespeople update retailers about new offerings or address any issues. But various competing constraints create a challenge for the salesperson in the field to design an optimal route. These include the time availability of the salespersons and relevant people in the retail stores. And also the dispersed nature of retail stores and prioritization of high-value stores.

A salesforce calendar optimization solution can help FMCG companies address the above issues. Considering the various constraints and locations of the stores, the software automatically generates a daily travel plan for the salesperson. The travel plan defines the sequence and time of visit to the assigned retail stores for each day.

An optimized beat plan can help salespeople in multiple ways:

• Reduce travel time and travel distance. This allows the salesperson to make frequent visits and spend more time in the stores.
• Ensure regular visits with adequate intervals to each retail store as per the store’s importance.
• Ensure visit happens as per each store’s preferred time window so that the discussion is more productive.

By implementing Beat Plan Optimization across the sales organization, the solution helps FMCG companies to achieve higher sales at lower costs.

AutoWiz Field Force Beat Plan Optimization solution generates an optimal Beat Plan with adherence to various constraints. These constraints include the various location and time based constraints related to the salesperson and the retail locations.

AutoWiz’s Field Force Beat Plan Optimization solution comes with a SalesPerson Mobile App and an Admin portal.

• Salespersons can view their daily travel schedules on the mobile app. They can also provide check-in and check-out times/locations for future analysis.
• The company can know the exact location of the Salesperson in real-time.
• The company can know the time spent by each Salesperson at a retail store. And the frequency of the visits to each store by the salesperson.
• They can then derive various key metrics like the ratio of sales volume and time spent. Or the ratio of sales volume to the frequency of visits to each retail store for further analysis/ actions.

AutoWiz also provides Route Optimization and Real-time delivery for other logistics operations like last-mile delivery, warehouse-to-retail store delivery and employee transportation. AutoWiz Route Planning Solutionconsists of:

• Route Planning Software that generates optimized Routes and Schedules
• App for field Crew to view their schedule, navigate and update status
• Route Plan Tracking in AutoWiz Fleet Management that tracks the progress of all routes and tasks in real-time