A Distributor Management System

Learn how we successfully implemented a new distributor management system that has efficiently onboarded over 800 new distributors, resulting in a substantial increase in productivity and revenue for our organisation.

A distributor management system (DMS) is a software platform that helps companies manage their distribution channels and sales processes. It provides tools to manage inventory, orders, invoices, and payments, as well as to monitor the performance of distributors and sales representatives..

Trade in Nigeria is largely Traditional(informal). There is zero or partial visibility on movement of stock , transactions which creates several challenges to Manufacturers.​ since are are building for distributors ,

Here’s how these problems affect distributors

High volume of Manual operations which leads to leaks and waste​

Low access to Capital and inability to leverage business resources due to poor documentation​

High volume operations in a volatile market with limited forecasting tools​

Real time visibility of Sales and Credit transactions

Easy management of stock across warehouses​

New Sales opportunities with low operations cost​

Access to working capital ​ ​

On this project, I am privileged to be the sole designer on the project, hence I had the responsibility to visualize the solution and bring it to life.

The design process involved a lot of secondary research (due to the time constraint) and it had me poring over multiple Distributor Management Solutions. As I did so, I questioned the design thinking processes and decisions, drew inspiration from a number of them and most especially noted design flaws I could not afford to repeat.

I really wanted to make out time to hear first-hand from potential users even though I was really pressed for time. This required me to prioritise and take time out of my own free time to speak to a couple of distributors, to understand their habits, their current challenges / pain points they face, and how they see the app making a difference in optimising pain areas.

I made it a point of duty that my designs were user centric and intuitive enough for even the most technologically unsay.

We had to priotize some features based on their importance to the user , the limited resources available to the team and the time constraints involved in building an MVP version of the product. Based on our research we were able to break down these features into sub units which are explained below Here are some key reasons why feature prioritisation is important when building an MVP:

Add a directory of all SKUs they have into one platform

Inventory could be tracked and eventually automated alerting them when they are running low on stocks

Able to see customer analytics data so they could engage their customers better

A wallet system for automating their sales & Inventory

After design was implemented, we made sure to do some usability testing to really understand how users will interact with the product and also make changes based on the results of the usability testing. Here’s how we went about it:

Collaborated with product managers and a product designer to conduct the usability test.

We tested with 102 distributors to guage how usable the application was

We gathered some useful insights from the usability testing conducted using our task scenarios as a key guide. We also decided on what feedback to implement based on the severity & priority level of the problem. We grouped insights into high-priority & low-priority levels. This helped us understand what to prioritize and what to de-prioritize. Here were some of the high priority issues we worked on:

Users had trouble booking SKUs from manufactuers

The Process of adding SKUs one after another was incredibly tiresome

Users needed to be able to see their offline sales and download receipts as much as theyd like

The project was an absolute success and the entire team was glad we were able to tap into a market based on the research we made and provide value for the business and our users. So far the product is currently in reach in 3 African countries which are Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana

We recorded over NGN 3 billion ($6.5m) in sales on the platform in a span of 7 months

Onboarded over 1,400 distributors on the platform in a span of 7 months

Manufacturers can now track product pricing across the redistribution cycle

A personal takeaway from me is . you can never go wrong when you back your assumptions with data