Sheela Foam is in the business of Home Comfort products, with 70+ exclusive distributors and 3,000+ dealers across the country. The biggest challenge the company faced was discounting. Controlling Market Operating Prices (MOP) was difficult as distributors/dealers manage their businesses as independent business identities and there was no synchronization and standardization between them.

To counter this issue, the company implemented a home grown ERP solution at its distributor locations across the country. The solution allows dealers to place online orders with their distributors, view account statements, performance against targets etc, through a B2B website. Further, each dispatched product is bar coded with a unique product serial number. The movement of the product from the factory to the customer can be tracked through this serial number. On selling a product, the dealer sends an SMS along with the product serial number and the customer’s mobile phone number, to the company. The system is then updated with this information and an SMS is sent to both the dealer and the customer acknowledging the sale.

The most important benefit of this implementation is that it allows the company to track product movement from factory to customer. With the order process getting automated, distributors and dealers can place orders online, thereby making the process faster and more efficient. With the deployment, discount margins are fixed, thereby allowing authorized dealers to retain their margins and wholeselling to unauthorized dealers has been reduced to almost nothing.