Marico continues to be at the forefront of using technology to improve ease of business for its distributors. Over the last four months, it has pilot-tested the automation of primary orders by distributors (project called “Prime 2”).
It has now outsourced the ordering platform to an IT company, as Marico considers ‘ordering’ to be a non-core activity. While this initiative will not boost sales in the near term, over the longer term (3-5 years) we see the following benefits: (a) More bandwidth for Marico’s sales officers to drive secondary sales, (b) Improved distributor morale as their inventory turns improve and hence their return on capital also improves; and (c) Robust systems and processes will help Marico scale up its business without high incremental investments in the sales force.
