Key Levers for Improvements

A detailed diagnosis helped us map each of the processes and understand the systems to manage those processes in the current state. This was followed by a solutioning exercise where the senior management of Sonalika brainstormed with the consulting team on the future state. Following major areas of improvements were identified:

1. Planning system: Though the statewise forecasts were fairly accurate, the dealers were not aligned to the plans. This led to deployment of insufficient funds and manpower by dealers into the business and hence failure of the plans.
   A detailed process incorporating market data and efforts & inputs requirements planning was implemented with Area Managers as the process owners.
2. Enquiry management: No Enquiry generation targets led to very low levels of Enquiries vis-a-viz the sales targets. The quality of leads were found to be suspect and there wasn’t sufficient follow up. This led to very high and unexpected variances in expected Vs actual sales.
   Enquiry targets, Lead Qualification process and Lead tracking system were defined to manage the steps.
3. Outstanding management: Analysis showed that the existing process was inadequate. Verbal plans were taken from Sales Executives who themselves had no visibility on case-to-case status. This led to over-optimistic fund targets and ultimately lack of funds for planned billings to dealers.
   Milestones were set with clear accountabilities between Sales and Retail Teams and target lead times to give visibility of progress of each customer’s outstanding with Dealers. Review systems helped flag the problems and efforts to expedite the process.
4. Channel Planning and Dealer Installation: Large number of the areas were always vacant and there was high attrition of dealers due to either poor quality of dealers getting selected or wrong commitments by Area Managers.
   Detailed evaluation procedures were defined with clear definition of timelines and responsibilities for different functions to ensure quick installation of high quality dealers.
5. Comprehensive Review Mechanism: Reviews were found to be not comprehensive enough at the Sales team level while almost no ‘structured’ review was done at the Dealership level. This was mainly due to lack of definition of Process KPIs and insufficient data which made reveiws very subjective.
   Daily reviews were set up at the Dealership level and between Dealers and ITL sales teams to track and manage resource deployment and productivity of the Dealership sales team. Reviews at Regional and HO levels helped drive plan adherence, review the 360o progress and to provide policy and resource support where needed.