Distributor Ordering and Field Force Software Case Study

The challenge

At Aries Agro, an agri-inputs manufacturer with a national distributor network, orders arrived as WhatsApp messages, photographs of handwritten sheets and phone calls, and were retyped into the accounting system by the internal sales desk. Product names were whatever the distributor called them, quantities were sometimes packs and sometimes units, and a schemed price agreed verbally in one conversation was invisible to anyone processing the order later. Field officers reported visits in a group chat, so there was no dependable record of which distributors had been seen in a given month, what was discussed or what was committed. Outstanding balances lived only in accounts, which meant new orders were regularly accepted from distributors already well past their credit terms and the problem surfaced weeks afterwards during collections.

The approach

We gave distributors a structured ordering channel that speaks in their own terms — their approved product list, their pack sizes, their agreed price list and their credit position shown at the point of ordering rather than discovered afterwards. Orders enter the system already validated, so retyping disappears and a scheme applies because it is attached to the distributor and the period rather than because someone remembered the conversation. The field application records visits against the distributor with location and time, captures the order taken or the reason none was, and works offline so a route through poor coverage is not a reporting gap. Outstandings and ageing were surfaced to both the field officer and the sales desk before an order is confirmed, with the rules on what happens over the limit made explicit rather than negotiated case by case.

The outcome

An order now arrives as data rather than as a message someone has to interpret, so the catalogue, pack size and price on the order are the agreed ones and the internal desk stops being a transcription service that also absorbs the errors. Because the credit position is shown while the order is being placed, an overdue account is a decision made deliberately at the point of sale rather than a discovery made later during collections. Field activity is a record instead of a chat history, so it can be asked questions of, which route was covered, which distributors have not been visited, which visits produced no order and why, and a conversation about coverage is settled by looking rather than by asserting.

WhatsApp wins in distribution because it is where the distributor already is, and any system that ignores that gets bypassed within a fortnight. The aim was not to take the channel away but to give the same convenience a structure underneath it.

The part that changed behaviour most was showing outstandings at the moment of ordering, which is why Sazinga Field surfaces the credit position on the order screen rather than in a report. Credit discipline enforced weeks later is a collections problem; the same information shown before the order is placed is simply part of the decision.