Zagol milk: digitising upstream and downstream processes within the supply chain from a dairy company

Industry: Dairy

Region: Ethiopia

The Client

The demand for milk product has been steadily increasing over the past years in Ethiopia, due to its nutritional value. In Ethiopia 98% of the milk is produced by smallholder farmers, then taken to milk factories, where it is pasteurised and processed into dairy products such as yoghurt, butter and cheese to be sold to the upper middle class  in larger cities.

Zagol Milk is an Ethiopian dairy brand produced by SANO Beverages Manufacturing Plc, a joint venture project between Melkam and international beverage producers. It is positioned on that segment of the market. It is small company with 10 sales representatives that we have helped to digitise, on its relationship with their suppliers (smallholder farmers) and retailers. 

Watch the video to understand their brand positioning

The Challenge

The main pain point that brought Zagol to look for a digital solution was the downstream sales tracking. Before FieldPro, all recording of the sales were done on pen and paper, which led to poor information for decision making and incomplete database:

• No identification of retailers purchasing products

• Troubles tracking vehicle’s route across the city

• Vague information on the area coverage of their customers in the city

The second challenge was about tracking the supply of milk from a wide number of smallholders farmers, which constitute half of the supply and for which it is essential to track the quality of the milk provided and the regularity. Every morning 1000 liters are collected in the area between Chancho and Derba. Zagol has turned to these supply sources to be able to meet the market demand, which cannot be fulfilled with its own farm.

The other half of the milk is provided by Zagol’s own factory, with 100 cows. The factory is located at Sululta, one-hour drive from the north of Addis Abeba, the capital of Ethiopia. The factory processes 2000-3000 litres a day.

The Solution

FieldPro App was implemented in 2020 to digitise and automate upstream and downstream processes within the supply chain. 

1. Upstream Tracking with a Collection Workflow and a SmallHolder List

In FieldPro a custom list was created to identify all the supply source on the following dimension:

• Type of supply (smallholder farm, commercial farm, Zagol own farm, etc)

• GPS location

• Area

• Contact details

As of now, 220 have been identified, which allows Zagol to view the information per supplier.

A collection workflow was implemented whereby for each smallholder farmers the following inputs are captured:

• Acceptance or not of the supply

• Reasons for rejection

• Lactometer value

• Quantity accepted / rejected

• Quality indicators (density, water, salt, etc)

The storage at the farm, the collection of the milk as well as the transport to the factory is commonly done at ambient temperature. As a result, a part of the milk arriving at the factory is not suitable for production and rejected by the factory due to the bad quality.

This workflow can be found as one of the workflow template for any similar type of supplier tracking: https://fieldproapp.com/workflowtemplates/supply-chain-sourcing.

This results in the following KPIs being monitored on real time dashboards:

2. Sales Digitisation

On the sales side, similarly a list was created to identify all the customers purchasing Zagol products, with information about their location, type, contact details, etc.

Every type of information in the app was translated into the Ethiopian language (Amharic) to make it easy for the sales representatives to use the app.

As of now, 1200 unique customers have been fully registered on the app.

Through the map section of FieldPro web app, Zagol can easily understand the coverage of its sales force and the areas that are not visited.

Thanks to the GPS tracking, Zagol management can follow where the sales representatives are going during the day.

The direct sales workflow was implemented to capture the sales done, as per our standard template:

https://fieldproapp.com/workflows/direct-sales

The performance of the sales can be followed in real time on the dashboards section of the web application.

Another workflow has been implemented to monitor the inventory at the warehouse in terms of crates of milk deposited and returned.

The Impact

Since FieldPro was deployed, the following KPIs have been achieved:

• Complete identification of 1200 retailers and 200 suppliers

• An increase by 50% of the sales done per sales representative

And the Zagol management has given us credit for helping them better structure the business.

“Optimetriks solution has been generating real time information to decide and act quickly in our dairy business. We use them to control our products' delivery status to our clients (outlets and agents) through sales representatives, and also for customers' compliance handling as the customers comments on quality of our dairy products”.

Melkam Endale, CEO, Zagol (Sano)

“Innovative and clear app that enables me to handle my sales data and my inventory (warehouse). The updated FieldPro is such interesting to aggregate and analyzing the whole data (Tabular, graphically, pie chart and bar graph)!”

Endegana Abera, Admin and Finance, Zagol (Sano)