Beat Planning and Optimisation

Beat planning is getting a lot of importance and therefore, time and effort, for each distribution point and each sales resource for a FMCG company and its stakeholders. The common terms used for beat planning are “effective territory design” and “Permanent Journey Plan or PJP“.  A well-thought through beat plan ensures multiple benefits at the frontliner level:

1. A territory or geography gets divided into focus zones called beats that are MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive)
2. Each beat has a defined retail and end-consumer universe out of which company extracts a particular share
3. Each beat gets optimally touched and serviced by company’s sales team based on different factors
4. Each beat’s sales performance can be analysed with ease

Traditionally, this job of beat planning and optimization was handled at a line manager level (say area sales manager) who were experts of their specific geography and had deep knowledge about each beat. However, as retail expanded with more outlets and more products, this task couldn’t be effectively done manually and companies resorted to beat optimization through technology. Below is a picture of a traditional beat design:

Over the years, FMCG companies have worked with SFA players to improvise on beat planning and optimisation but the entire process till date remains manual. Lets look at the maths:

• 495 cities with 100,000 population or more as per Census of India 2011
• 20-30 beats per such city
• Almost 10,000 beat names to be managed with each new resource having its own spelling of the beat name

Peri’s team identified this problem while working with top FMCG companies who were struggling with beat planning and no one in the company was actually analyzing beats because as its common with technology implementations “Junk in, junk out”. India’s top sales leaders collaborated with us to create a new benchmark in beat creation, beat planning and beat optimization which is aligned to the agility, strategic sales objectives of the industry.

We invite you to evaluate our proprietary algorithm to do the following:

1. Automated beat name creation
2. Automated employee outlet assignment to beats
3. Periodic beat efficiency and performance tracking
4. Easy Beat transfer
5. Beat report card