Tracking Sales Promotion Activities and Effectiveness of Fertilizers on Crop Health

Large fertilizer manufacturing companies in India envision to transition from primarily bulk fertilizer supplier business models to specialized/customized farm solutions. This vision drives them to create a network of specialists across the focus states in India, who are involved at farm level discussions, soil health data collection, crop-specific problem identification, creation of farmer databases and promote specific fertilizer products. This large workforce has an extremely local presence in rural areas and reports to respective area managers, who track their engagements and performance. Before deploying technology enabled solution, such companies face a lot of problems in getting data from the field on time and in a structured manner. This hampers the process of assessing marketing activities, performance goal measurement and creation of database for prospective buyers.

The Problem

One of such fertilizer manufacturers has a network of area managers and sales promoters (or field agents) spread across the regions of interest in India, with focus on specific crops and cropping needs. In order to accomplish the goals of reaching the unreached, collecting soil samples, monitoring the health of crops pre- and post-application of fertilizer products, etc., the organization has the following requirements:

The organization assessed this requirement and realized a single unified platform enabling field-to-office data collection and visualization is extremely crucial. Geolocation, timestamp and user details were also required to be mapped.

The Solution

Transerve deployed its proprietary field-to-office GIS workflow solution: Transerve Data Collector (TDC), for this requirement. Transerve team created an administrator-user tree on the Data Collector web platform. Users (field agents) were mapped to their respective area managers, who in turn, were mapped to administrators in Central HQ. Master Administrator created survey templates for all the basic requirements ranging from soil sample collection to monthly attendance of field agents. TDC platform ensured that specific forms were passed on to specific area managers and field agents through its Android-based Data Collection platform. The survey forms or templates were clubbed together in the form of projects and passed on to the team seamlessly with just a click-of-a-button.

The field agents were trained on how to sign up and use the app for data collection. Once they went live, they started pushing data in a specific format allocated to them, thereby eliminating the discrepancies in data reporting. Administrators are able to access to the data pushed from the field on a near real-time basis on an easy-to-use web interface. They can either view the data on a map or can download the data in industry-standard formats like CSV, SHP, KML, etc.

Product Features

The Impact

• Monthly attendance reaches the HQ on 1st day of every month
• 300 (and increasing!) field agents connected on a single platform
• A comprehensive database of nearly 5000 progressive farmers created in just 10 days
• Deployed for field staff in 7 states in India in just 3 days

Platform Benefits

Aligned to the vision of being a specialized farm solutions provider, collecting timely data on various inputs for decision making and monitoring marketing activities is of utmost importance. TDC platform has ensured a sustainable way of getting the data collection activities on track. The major goals that are achieved with this choice of the solution are: