While there are significant retail technology solution developments that are taking place in the areas of marketing, planning and analytics, a critical component of the sales and marketing process is effective and efficient retail execution. Recent research has shown that almost 50 percent of promotions fail due to inefficiencies in retail execution.

Initial efforts in the area of retail execution were to bring in automation efficiencies into the execution process, especially in the areas of order management and direct store delivery. However, with the changing role of the field representative as a trade relationship executive and a source of intelligent market information, newer challenges are emerging in the areas of trade marketing.

The challenge around retail execution is to be able to enable the field representative to execute trade marketing activities like retail audits, surveys, assessments and other compliance and monitoring requirements in the market.

Further, the need to be able to tag these executed trade marketing activities to the plan to assess execution effectives and compliance are significant challenges.

ITC Infotech, though its experience of having been involved with multiple customers in enabling field force automation, has developed capabilities in both the trade marketing and field sales execution areas. It has been involved in building integrated trade management solutions comprising of the closed loop “plan-execute-evaluate” framework.

ITC Infotech has been able to create solutions that effectively translate planned marketing objectives into executable activities through the efficient integration of the back end sales & marketing system and the field representative's hand held devices. Significant among these are activities around promotion execution and compliance monitoring which is critical for settlements.

The retail solutions developed support trade marketing execution activities like contracts management, retail audits, assessments and merchandise tracking apart from the field order management functionality for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies.

• Comprehensive trade marketing activity enablement on the Handheld device
  
• Integrated sales management functionality with clear linkages to assess the plan vs. actual performance
  
• Faster turn around time using the global best practices knowledge repository of ITC Infotech in the areas of retail execution and trade management