With the ever changing market dynamics, businesses are evolving every minute to stay relevant. In an increasingly competitive environment, having a solution for tracking channel sales is very important in order to achieve increased revenues and faster ROIs. Owing to this, more & more companies are consciously going for distributor management software for a complete visibility of their channel sales.
There can be various approaches of managing the distributor network. While some approaches are fairly new, some have been prevalent for quite some time in the industry. It’s also hard to pin-point one particular approach that would work one hundred percent for the entire distributor network.
Various approaches to managing your Distributor network are:
1. Custom Billing Software: This approach was one of the first approaches to be introduced in the industry by large brands to manage their distributor network. According to this approach, the principal company asked its super stockists and big distributors to install its own custom billing software and do all the transactions through it. This approach worked well then but in today’s scenario it’s completely irrelevant. This is because the time when this approach was introduced, the concept of multi brand distributors was unheard of. Mostly distributors used to manage one or two brands so using a custom billing software wasn’t a big headache for them. With the rise of multi brand distributors, demand for an alternative approach to DMS was felt.
2. Web Portals: Another way of managing the distributor network would be web portals. In this, the company provides a web portal to its distributors through which the distributors have to enter all the sales related transactions specific to the company. Companies face increasing resistance from their distributors for implementation of Web Portal based DMS. Primary reason being that the distributors managing multiple brands find it extremely cumbersome and time consuming to firstly learn and then use different web portals for the different brands.
Since, the web portal is just for reporting purposes and the billing is actually done on a different system, it is observed that distributors provide fake sales data to justify their targets whereas in reality the figures are quite different. This as a whole beats the purpose of implementing a DMS as there is a possibility of misappropriation of Data by the distributors.
Another limitation of this approach is its dependency on internet connectivity. We all know that good internet connectivity is still a luxury even in many metro cities of the country let alone Tier 3 & Tier 4 cities. So a web portal based DMS might not be able to map the entire distributor network.
3. Data Extractors: The data extraction method, as opposed to custom solutions or web portals, implies exporting data from the distributor’s billing software and then importing it on the company’s software. This method didn’t work well and was short lived.
4. Integration with Distributor’s Tally / Busy: This is a new approach of integrating with the distributor’s accounting software (usually Tally & Busy) thereby enabling companies to be seamlessly connected with the distributors billing software. Making their life easy by reducing the pain of duplication, multiple entries in different systems, data mismatch, Item alteration, Price sanctity and lot more just by working on their existing TALLY system.
Eazy DMS works on this same principal and is integrated with Tally & Busy. It bridges the information gap that manufacturer’s having a distribution network normally face, without having to deploy any new system at the distributor’s end. It gives them real time access to the secondary sales data & inventory and enables better decision making. Therefore, there is no need to regularly follow up with your distributors for reports and information.
Limitation to this method is mapping distributors who are not using Tally or Busy for accounting purpose or those small time distributors who don’t use a billing software at all. For this the next approach might be useful.
5. Mobile Apps: Latest trend amongst all is a mobile based - lite DMS wherein the distributor can do the data entry on the mobile app. This approach is more useful to map the rural distributor network where infrastructure is not that developed or in case of very small distributors who don’t have the resources or knowledge of using a desktop.
Comparison between the three most common types of DMS:
A quick summary to showcase how the three types of DMS are different in terms of functionality.
| Features | Custom Billing Software | Web Portal | Tally Integrated DMS (Eazy DMS) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Integration with Principle Company ERP | |||
| Integration with SFA | |||
| Works in Offline Mode | |||
| Multi Brand Billing @ Distributor Level | |||
| Scheme Management | |||
| SKU Mapping | |||
| Analytical Tools | |||
| Low Support & License Cost | |||
| Low Manpower & Training Cost | |||
| Change Management | High | High | Low |
| Real Time Data Analysis | |||
| Data Discrepancy Tracking |
With the proper software fueling your sales and distribution activities, you can achieve high performance in even the most fast-moving and fragmented marketplace. Designed for the complex Indian market landscape, EAZY DMS is a distributor management system that provides complete visibility of the secondary Sales or stock lying at the distributor’s end. It can be integrated with the distributor’s Tally/ Busy, so that companies don’t have to deploy a separate portal at the distributor’s end and still can keep track of all relevant information. The distributor can keep using his existing Tally/ Busy software for his day to day billing and other activities.
A Tally/ Busy integrated DMS like EAZY DMS is not just about pulling the data from the distributor; it is also capable of pushing information to the distributors like the masters, prices and schemes that eventually brings a lot of grip and control to the principal. The Master & Price control enables the principal company to exercise a complete control over distributor’s MRP, Item Alteration, Back date entries, Ledger Alteration, Negative Stock billings and Reorder levels. The PO generated by Distributor’s Tally syncs automatically in the principal's ERP software thus automating the primary sales as well.
Eazy DMS offers an entire spectrum of DMS solution which includes Tally integrated DMS, Web portal as well as mobile DMS in order to capitalize on the maximum number of distributors for a company. So a Tally integrated DMS might work for most of your distributors but for mapping the small distributors that are not using any billing software of their own or are not using Tally / Busy, for them a mobile DMS makes more sense as it’s easy to adopt without much of infrastructure investment and training.
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