Episode 123 Convert it into numbers.

Having left the sales department and moved to factory administration "against my will", in the end, I was given a department that could be perfectly described by the phrase "a fish in water"... that was spot on.
It started with the idea of expressing the "doubts" I felt during my sales days in concrete numbers.

In sales at a food manufacturer where the power map is repainted every six months, what I was suffering from was the fact that "I didn't know what I was selling".
A salesperson's sales performance is the total sales amount of the clients they are in charge of, and it is managed based on sales amounts, such as whether they have achieved their budget or cleared the previous year's results.
The question I had here was that the sales side lacks the perspective of "what are we selling?"

From the sales side's perspective, achieving the budgeted sales amount is the sole and greatest goal, and what is being sold is a separate issue.
Sell products that are easy to sell and achieve sales... the content inside that is secondary.
How to achieve sales depends on the salesperson's way of thinking and skill; there are those who are good at selling flagship products called staples, and there are salespeople who are better at selling off-the-beaten-path, unique items than the standard, classic products.

Therefore, even if salespeople "vaguely" understand, they may not know as concrete numbers "what kind of products are selling and how much every day" for each client.
On top of that, the "sales pitches (= special sales)" that the salesperson has set up are added, and unfortunately, this becomes the cause of it being difficult to understand when checking sales later.
When analyzing sales data later, whether looking at it from the client axis or the product axis, it is extremely difficult to tell whether it is the "staple" portion that is the base sales or the "special sale" portion that the salesperson set up...

So, the first thing I worked on was having the salespeople themselves understand what they were selling.

For a company wanting to improve production efficiency, it was a time when the momentum was growing to tackle the reduction of the "3Ms"—muri (unreasonableness), muda (waste), and mura (unevenness)—across the entire company, involving the sales side, and the content I was thinking of as a case study for that initiative matched the system development.

Amidst the sluggish Heisei recession, it was the timing when a mid-sized food manufacturer, which had been doing its best just to sell and had reached its limit in effectively doing sales activities and production-side cost reductions separately, finally realized this and started to take action.

Thinking about "special sales" and "staples" separately... just as I started analyzing the numbers personally, I was approached by system development... "Let's give that a shape."
The work of converting the "amount" of sales, which has no form in sales, into the "number" of concrete products is based on the idea that because I can only understand things that are visible, I wanted to create a "ruler" that I could see.

In this way, I, who did not bloom in sales, found job satisfaction in the factory administration workplace.
The foundation for that was, as expected, the work of preparing things that I could feel secure with, namely "visible" and a "ruler" which are ASD-like, and that linked to the company's profit improvement, allowing me to ride the wave.

Coincidentally, a job that allowed me to make the most of my strengths came around again.

Old Blog Archive 2019/1/15