Finding Success in the Last Mile: Offline Sales & Supply Chain

Our friends, Michel Dauguet, WASH Director and Gordon Lau, Information System Architect at iDE Global showed us how their Sanitation Marketing Program created a system to manage over 6,000 orders each month through its network of 200+ sales agents, 100 independent latrine manufacturers and 25 supply chain coordinators across rural Cambodia. To date, iDE has been able to sell 140,000 latrines in just 2.5 years and over the next three years plan to sell more than 223,000 latrines through supply chain sales.   

So how did they do it? Well it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing at the beginning. For ‘Supply Chain 1.0,’ (iDE’s first version of a supply chain in Cambodia) iDE experienced high turnover of their salespeople known as ‘Sanitation Teachers’ thus when demand was low and supply was high it caused issues for the manufacturers while conversely there was production volatility when demand outpaced supply.  In order, to better manage their supply chain sales and mitigate those issues experienced with Supply Chain 1.0, they launched ‘Supply Chain 2.0.’ For this version, iDE leveraged TaroWorks and Salesforce which allowed them 360-degree visibility into their operations and enabled their supply chain to be bigger, faster and that much better than Supply Chain 1.0.

Supply Chain 2.0 is just four simple steps and works like this….

Entering Order: After a successful sale by a Sanitation Teacher an order is thumb-printed on paper. Then information is captured on an Android device via TaroWorks (includes pictures and GPS).

Assigning Order: Orders are batched together and assigned to suppliers know as Latrine Business Owners (LBO) with a technique known as ‘load balancing.’ This is done by the Supply Chain Coordinator via Salesforce Community.

Confirming Order: Supply Chain Manager meets or calls the LBO with the order assigned to him. If the LBO accepts the orders, he commits to a delivery date. The Supply Chain Coordinator records the committed delivery date and the orders are considered confirmed.

Recording Deliveries: LBO logs completed deliveries in a paper register. During a weekly meeting, Supply Chain Coordinator will record all deliveries, cancellations and postponements through TaroWorks.

There you go. That’s how you can seamlessly manage offline sales and supply chain. For all the details, watch the full webinar above and if you have any further questions or comments, email us!