5 Keys To Choose The Right Mobile Van Sales System

Many of our customers, who are Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) manufacturer or distributor often asked us why they should invest into a Mobile Van Sales or Direct Store Delivery solutions. In their mind, they already know how complex their operations are especially dealing with “on-the-go” warehouses which having valuable inventory.

Typically a van sales driver required to drive to their customers according to their daily itinerary, usually a route list. They need to several tasks such as checking stock, replenish shelves, issuing invoices, collecting payments and handling goods returns. Furthermore, they need to perform daily settlement reports such as Stock Movements and Cash Proceeds when they came back to the depot.

With all these complexity, running the operations manually just doesn’t cut it. The operation has to be digitalized with a proper Mobile Van Sales System / Distribution Management System.

Most importantly there are 5 key points to consider when choosing such system:

Inventory Management

A moving warehouse away from the office is essentially vulnerable to pilferage. Also the driver should be aware how much stocks he has when doing selling without checking his truck back and forth. The inventory should be transparent and keep tracks all the movement.

Works in both Offline / Online

Imagine this, the driver found himself in an area which has barely connected to data network. If the system is running solely on online mode, he will be frustrated in a situation he can’t make a sale and wasting his time to move around to get the signal coverage. Therefore the solutions must be proven that it can works 100% offline without depending on the internet.

Rapid Returns Handling

For high perishable business such as bread, dairies, or fresh noodles, it tends to have high volume of goods returns or exchanges due to very short expiry dates. The solutions must be able to handle these returns/exchanges without to creating multiple transactions which will consumed too much of the driver time. Imagine visiting 15 shops a day and issuing 2 X documents which is 30 of it.

Accurate Customer Information

From time to time, the driver might need to access the customer information such as debtor aging, outstanding bills, credit terms/limit, payment history and sales history. These information is crucial to them in order to provide top notch customer service.

Route Planning & GPS Tracking

As a manager, you need to know where your drivers went to and did they service the customer according to the daily route plan, according to your business priorities. With the right solutions, you can track whether they comply with the route planning and also tracking the time stamps of check-in/check-out. All visitations should also come with a geo-tagged information for monitoring purposes.