The Pledge

As the Indian economy leaves behind the good, bad and ugly memories of 2020 and enter 2021 with revived hope, enthusiasm and positivity wrapped with a degree of uncertainty and fear at the subconscious level, Peri CRM has taken a pledge. We aim to empower the Indian FMCG industry including all our existing and future customers with continuous, and easy-to-comprehend data and business insights, interesting structured in various cuts and slices that can trigger meaningful conversations between line managers and frontline sales executives.  

In 2021, Peri CRM’s best-in-class Data Visualisation and Analytics platform Peri Analytics, powered by Zoho Analytics, sitting on top of our highly functional, easy-to-adopt Salesforce automation (SFA) and Distribution management (DMS) mobile and web applications, will generate and push analysable data and data-driven insights at unprecedented scale to all levels of stakeholders, from feet-on-street to the CEO

Data Is Our Pillar

From day one, the leadership team at Peri CRM knew that the success of any enterprise-level software depends on two essential pillars – ease of adoption and analysable data. A sales and distribution automation software needs to be first adopted by the end-user (including the frontliner, middle and senior managers), and then it needs to churn enormous amount of data in all possible cuts and slices with advanced capabilities of visualisation and analysis.

Both these elements have remained the core of Peri CRM and we have delivered successful implementation with leading Indian companies in the FMCG space across various product verticals and have empowered companies with powerful reporting and dashboarding capabilities as explained below: 

1. Tablular reports: Tabular reports on Peri Analytics allows customers to create a custom spreadsheet-like view and apply various functionalities like grouping, summarizing (by applying formulae) and filtering data. This helps FMCG companies to reduce dependency on manually created spreadsheet with not dynamic, requires version management and is prone to errors. 
2. Pivot reports: Perhaps the most utilised and effective data viewing capability of Microsoft Excel has been a Pivot table. Pivot reports on Peri analytics allows customers to dynamically rearrange, group and summarize large sets of data, and create interactive and meaningful summaries using an intuitive drag and drop interface. This is supported by advanced capabilities like sorting, Expand/Collapse Option, viewing underlying data, exporting into multiple formats (like csv, xls, pdf and HTML) and sharing the report on email, mobile and web platforms. 
3. Charts: as the common saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words”, charts help understand and analyse a data set much easier and with higher probability of deriving insights over any Tables or pivots.  Charts on Peri analytics provide an easy to use, drag and drop interface which enables customers to create engaging and detailed visualisations easily. Peri supports a wide range of chart types such as Area, Line, Bar, Stacked, Pie, Scatter, Combination, Funnel, Web etc. This is supported by a wide range of options to customize charts like Titles, Colors, Legends, Tooltips etc and interactivity options like On-Mouse over highlights, Data Drill Down, Legend based filters, User Filters, Chart Exports, etc.
4. Dashboards: Dashboard is an effective way of organizing reports into a single page to have a quick insight into the Key Metrics at a glance. Peri analytics provides a simple & intuitive drag and drop interface for creating dashboards in minutes, with additional capability for adding single numbered widgets and chart type widgets within dashboards. These are called KPI Widgets. This is a pretty useful feature to highlight any key metric in a dashboard for easy comprehension. The key metric can be accompanied with associated comparison indicator or plotted against a target to show progression. 

The Big Shift in 2021 

The world will not be the same in 2021 because of what we went through in 2020. A lot of macro-economic shifts are going to take place that may alter the consumer & market behaviour, organisational policies and business processes. Business leaders will be confronted with complex problems and will need precise, diverse and highly flexible data to back their decision making. Concepts like Product management (in terms of inventory, pricing and availability), Customer management (in terms of understanding and forecasting) and Human resource management (in terms of restructuring or reengineering) would be hot topics in boardrooms.

For the Indian FMCG companies who maintain a decent sized fieldforce (say 50 or more frontliners and middle managers), the focus of 2021 would be to keep them motivated, disciplined and productive with minimal physical engagement with the aim to translate them onto digital platforms completely. Physical movement, market visits, joint working, retail surveys and traditional ways of driving sales numbers will undergo a paradigm shift. Frontliners will be pushed to take bigger, more comprehensive roles in terms of assessing competition, market demand, motivating distributor and more. Managers would be pushed to drive sales in larger territories without expanding manpower, to precisely judge market inventory and forecast production for their territories, to run trade promotions with predictable return of investment, adhere strictly to automation and present insightful data during monthly meetings. Senior managers would be pushed to reduce their reliance on elaborate MIS teams who work on adhoc reporting requirements from various stakeholders throughout the year.

Instead, organisations will be required to create standard data analysis frameworks (the single version of truth) which all functions will adhere (including sales, logistics, marketing, finance and production), to bring agility in decision making through dynamic (not static) data sets, and to derive tangible business benefits.  Bottom line is that in 2021, analysable data churned from an enterprise-level software will be the only way to comprehend a scenario with so many degrees of freedom.  

We Never Shy Away

As a company, Peri’s motto is to translate the benefits of automation to Indian FMCG companies and in today’s business environment, data and data-driven insights are the biggest assets. Which is why Peri’s customers are never short of data, where they get access to infinite reports, charts and dashboards, all at the speed of light (our typical TAT is 30 minutes).

Our data analytics team are highly trained professionals who follow a two-pronged approach to exposing analysable data to an organisation – one, as part of implementation they expose a set of industry-standard reports and customise at this stage based on the prevalent data culture in the organisation. Second, they work with senior managers and data-analysts of the organisation to capture incremental Adhoc data requirements during the first 3-6 months of adoption. And of course, as the company matures in their automation journey, these requirements keep increasing with higher degree of complexity.

As a culture, Peri CRM never shy away from taking any data requirement because data is what gives us the kick and our team is super confident to churn out a meaningful report from a raw data set in a matter of minutes. We proudly claim to the industry – Peri CRM is not a black box unlike other CRM’s and SFA’s, our power lies in structuring and showcasing data in a transparent, insightful and actionable form.  

Role of Peri CRM

We treat ourselves as the custodians of organisational sales & distribution data, a role that we take very seriously. Which is why we have powered Peri CRM with world’s leading cloud architecture (AWS) and Data visualisation and analysis engine (Zoho) for our clients. Till 2020, our approach to provide analysable data and data-driven insights to Indian FMCG companies was need-based and passive. Which means we were providing industry-standard reports, charts and dashboards and supporting the data teams of organisations on a regular basis. However, we were not proactively digging at newer ways, techniques of viewing and analysing data. Or we were not pushing companies to adopt advanced data analysis practices across their organisational hierarchy.  

That is going to change in 2021. Peri’s data team will proactively work with Indian FMCG companies and show them the infinite possibilities of the “Data Universe”. We will expose then unique ways of looking at data, pick best practices from across the world, give data alerts and notifications based on rules, push filtered data across the organisational hierarchy and ensure the entire organisation is aligned to a single of truth. And most importantly, we will make this analysable Data available on Mobile devices for on-the-go data-driven insights.