Bajaj Electricals uses Tally for distribution network management
Company
Bajaj Electricals
Headquarters : Mumbai, Maharashtra
Industry : Manufacturing
A renowned and dominant component of Bajaj Group, one among India’s giant conglomerates, Bajaj Electricals specializes in Consumer Products (Appliances, Fans, Cookware), Lighting (Consumer and Professional Lighting), and EPC (Power Transmission and Distribution); some of the primary brand offerings of Bajaj Electricals include BAJAJ, Morphy Richards, and Nirlep.
A major player in the consumer products sector of India, Bajaj’s distribution network management touches an expansive network of 18 branch offices, 1000+ distributors, and more than 2.3 lakh retail outlets across India, combined with over 500 consumer care centres.
The vast distribution network of Bajaj Electricals, comprising as much as 1000 distributors across India, used multiple different software for daily businesses. Initially, Bajaj faced hurdles in terms of distribution network management as they had access solely to the primary data of distributors which revealed only what Bajaj was billing the distributors and not what the distributors were billing to the retailers they were dealing with.
A challenge arose here as Bajaj Electricals were progressing into a replenishment model that demanded the secondary data from distributors, with details on the daily sales from the distributor’s end. It pointed to the necessity of a software for efficient distribution network management as Bajaj’s new model emphasized on billing the distributors based on consumption.
Bajaj Electricals faced quite a good number of hurdles as different distributors used different sets of software, making the billing process a time-consuming affair as there was too much of manual work involved pertaining to each distributor. In the early phases, distributors had the discretion to use the software of their choice and all the software were integrated to the Bajaj server. However, this made the process extremely complex and could not serve the purpose of getting everyone on a common platform, thereby causing further complications.
After one to two years of struggle with multiple software integrating to Bajaj server, the concept of centrally integrated single billing system surfaced crucial. Bajaj Electricals had only one option under consideration as the best billing software for their business – Tally! “We had all the distributors across India used to specifically mandatorily tally so those who were not using tally were given a training and since it is a very simple software it would take around a day or two for the distributor to get accustomed to Tally, and from the next day he would be ready to do all his transactions in Tally,” says Urmi Patel, Business Analytics Manager at Bajaj Electricals.
Apex Act Soft, a Tally Partner, created an SSV module for Bajaj to follow where whatever billing a distributor would do was logged in to the SSV which then gets transferred to the Bajaj server. This implied a seamless real-time synchronization of the distributor’s sales and transactions in Tally.
The distributors dealt with sales of not just Bajaj products but competitor products as well. This paved way to some hesitation in sharing the data with Bajaj Electricals. The module was thus further customized for Bajaj, helping the distributors share only Bajaj transactions with Bajaj Electricals. Tally’s easy and customized billing solutions proved delightful to Bajaj as well as the distributors, enabling a complete win-win situation.
Bajaj Electricals follows a replenishment model, which is a smoothened process that focuses on an enhanced mode of inventory management. The integration of Tally in the model streamlined the supply chain management in the best possible manner. Whenever a branch bills a distributor for a specific number of units, the branch is billed for the same amount of units by the central warehouse. This enables better availability of products across India. “Right now the supply chain can easily find out where there is a gap as we are getting data daily, we can easily supply it to them daily. We have somewhere around 750 SKUs. The price of all of these SKUs depend on what is the raw material price at that particular time or what is the current situation or the oil price is completely dependent on external factors. So it would happen that we had to change our price list very frequently. Every time there was a change in a price list we had to go across to all the 500 distributors manually take their system on board and we had to change the prices. Bajaj has a common pricing across India. We came up with a solution that we would have a push kind of a system for prices which would be a completely automated system and now we have such solution that today the marketing team pushes the prices from Bajaj immediately the next day the prices gets reflected at all the distributors. Hence this particular model has really helped us,” adds Ms. Patel.
The territory heads and area heads at Bajaj Electricals continuously review the distributor sales officers’ data which is already available in Tally in the form of reports. The intuitive Tally reports makes the review very simple and enables the reviewer to identify the problem areas accurately. All the distributor-related data such as joining date, insurance data and so on are readily available with Tally. Overall, Bajaj Electrical vouches for the easy-to-use and precise reporting feature of Tally, citing the delightful experience they have with their distribution network.
Tally is a very simple software; it would take around a day or two for the distributor to get accustomed to Tally, and from the next day he would be ready to do all his transactions in Tally.
