BeatRoute is highly flexible platform. Once you understand a few concepts, it will be easy to setup or run BeatRoute. And use its flexibility to your advantage.

BeatRoute Entities

BeatRoute is purchase by a company. We see the world of those companies consist of their field force, their customers, their partners and interactions among them. Let’s understand these entities briefly:

Company

The company that purchase BeatRoute and uses it with its field force.

Customers

A Customer is company's customer or simply a point of interest. An entity that is covered by field force with a physical visit for a business transaction or simply an inspection.
To illustrate, for an FMCG company, customer is a neighborhood retail store on the other hand for a bank or insurance company, customer is an individual prospect, etc. BeatRoute allows you to rename the entities as per your need.

Partners

A Partner entity in BeatRoute represents an operational location.
You can rename it as per your need, for example, Distributor, if you are a consumer product company, or Branch Office, if you are a bank or an insurance company.
It is an entity that comes on top of a customer cluster that refers to a physical area. Partner entities can also have inventory to run dispatch operation in BeatRoute.

Routes/Workzones

Route/Workzone represents a group of customers that are serviced by a field force member. Route/Workzone is additionally linked to a partner entity that services it. For an FMCG company workzone is a route that represent a physical working area, and for an Investment product selling company workzone may be Mutual fund to which a relevant customer prospect is assigned.

Team Hierarchy in BeatRoute

Team is a hierarchy of human resources, which forms an organization structure. Following roles exist in team hierarchy -

On-Site Executives

On-Site Executives are tied to customer sites.
You can visualize them as Product Promoters at a Retail Stores or a Security Guard at a building’s gate. And don’t fret, if you cannot place an on-site executive in your business. It is an optional role.

Field Executives

The Field Executives are travelling members of the team, Field Executives visit customers with or without schedule to carry out certain transactions such as taking orders, collecting stock, delivery, pick-up, maintenance services, inspection or simply take notes of customer site. Field Executives are assigned to customers via a Route/Workzone.

Territorial Officer

The Territorial Officer is a person who oversees, evaluates, and plans for Field Executives and On-Site Executives. Territorial Officers themselves may be responsible for carrying out actions at customer or partner sites.

Manager

This is a placeholder role. one manager can report to another manager as per the vertical hierarchy of the organization. This facilitates the variable depth hierarchy in different branches of the organization. Managers can do analysis, monitoring, and you guessed it right, in the spirit of flexibility, we don’t’ stop them from doing any transactions that their teams can.

Business Processes, you can run with BeatRoute

Pretty much everything that you can imagine your field force doing. However we deliver ease of use with our concept of Process Templates, which are pre-packaged configurable workflows

Customer Profiling

Accurate customer profiling is considered a foundation by BeatRoute platform. With BeatRoute you can run extensive KYC operations including geo-profiling of your customers. Whether it is about geo-profiling of neighbourhood stores, social profiling of your prospects or completing KYC documentation, you can run elaborate profiling workflows.

Order Collection and Maximization

Order is collected from the customer and delivered by either partner/distributor entity or own depot/warehouse. The process is similar to the FMCG industry process. BeatRoute Uses it's scheme Engine and Recommendation Engine to propose an order quantity on the mobile application to maximize the sales from every visit.

Visual Merchandising

Visual Merchandising refers to how the merchandise is displayed to customers at point of sales. Visual Merchandising not only include display of product but also the relative position, decorations, signs, and shop-floor layout. The sole purpose of Visual Merchandising is to attract customers and induce them into buying.

Lead Management

Lead Management is a process of tracking and managing prospective customers using different stages of sales life cycle. Field Executives capture leads, record their activity against those leads, provide assistance to leads on products, and make them sales-ready.

Product Promoter Enablement

A Product Promoter is a demonstrator, responsible for promoting the product features to consumers or clients and attempts to persuade consumers/clients to buy the product. The Product Promoter Enablement means assisting on-site executives’ report their store presence, customer feedback, product display, stock availability, and competitor activation with GPS based reliability.

Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement is about running a loyalty program to reward the customers for their loyalty to the brand and encourages them to remain engaged and spend more.

Site Inspection and Patrolling

Across a number of business verticals, Field Executives may be assigned to the task of doing an inspection by filling out a checklist or taking pictures at multiple sites.
For example, Imagine a Maintenance Services company doing a preventive maintenance check for various machinery or equipment at a plant site or an electrical substation. Or an Agri Chemicals company sending its Agri Chemists to inspect a crop. Or a security services company’s officer visiting a school building in a holiday to make sure everything is alright.

Learning and Demonstration

Through this feature you can upload various media format files including videos and target them to specific roles of field force. It helps them train a scattered field force and also share media files that can be used for demonstration to individual customers. Think of a lubricant oil company’s Field Executive explaining a motor workshop owner, which vehicles can use their new product. Or an Agri Chemicals company’s market development staff demonstrating their new insecticide to a bunch of farmers at a remote village using the offline content in BeatRoute app.

Use one or more of process templates described above as per your business need.

BeatRoute Platform Features

Following features in BeatRoute help you achieve excellence in running a field force operation:

Location Based Transaction Tracking

As a central functionality all the activities are Geo-tagged in BeatRoute application. Contextual location based intelligence is also a common theme in BeatRoute.

Visit Planning and Scheduling

You can schedule a visit by a customer or by route/workzones. Scheduling by workzone for Field Executives is like a Beatplan for Sales Reps in FMCG industry. A regimen to visit a bunch of customers falling in a route/workzone on Monday, visit to another bunch that belong to another route/workzone on Tuesday and so on. Scheduling by individual customer is more relevant to Territorial Officer and Managers, who want to carefully decide, which customers they want to visit in their next journey and schedule them on their calendar.

Score Cards

A Score Card is used to monitor the company's and individual’s performance with respect to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the form of target v/s actual. BeatRoute score card has standard KPIs such as Total Visits, Range of Products per visit or Sales Value and many other KPIs that customers can choose to enable. Score card also allows the flexibility of defining custom KPIs by customers themselves and publishing those to the entire team by simply uploading them or using our APIs to automate this. Score Card is available to everyone in the team hierarchy, which means any individual can see their own performance and that of any direct or indirect report.

Configurable Notification and Alerts

BeatRoute supports three types of notifications: 1) System Generated Notifications: An individual transaction can generate a notification based on certain pre-defined criteria. For example, Competition scheme feedback from a point of sale triggers a notification to supervisor of the respective area.  2) Notification Broadcast: An administration or a manager can trigger a notification to all his team members or selectively from the portal. 3)Scheduled Notifications: There are certain pre-defined notifications that customer can schedule. For example, Alerting supervisors when an on-site-field executive does not report to the site or when a product promoter of a store does not report any sales in the day. As of Q1 2018 there are only a few such notifications possible. Our product roadmap involves increasing the list.

Attendance

Attendance is calculated automatically in BeatRoute based on activities done by field force. Except for Onsite Field Executives, no other role requires explicit check-in. It is automatically generated.