Working in Forbes Gokak Ltd:

On 11th July 2005, I joined Delhi office of Forbes Gokak Ltd as Sales Engineer for Solid Carbide cutting tools for North India. Before joining Forbes Delhi office I had worked as Market Research Engineer for Solid Carbide Cutting Tools with the same company. I had been recruited by company on contract basis but was later appointed as a Sales and Application Engineer for North India. Solid Carbide cutting tools were manufactured in joint venture with M A Ford, America. Company had manufacturing unit at Aurangabad. The job as Market Research Engineer comprised of visiting major end users of Solid Carbide Drills and End mills and calculate the true potential of its market in India. Through this assignment I had visited all the biggest manufacturing units in India. After the completion of the survey I was transferred to Delhi to look after the sales of Solid Carbide in the Northern region. The experience of Market Survey was very useful for me in the initial phase of work.

Anatomy of Job:
I had been to Delhi previously for Market Survey. Therefore I had a bit of knowledge of our dealers and End user companies in my territory. Forbes Gokak uses SAP for CRM, billing and other purposes. Initially most of my time went in learning and understanding SAP. The software was very complex and required good amount of training to understand well. The sale of Solid Carbide was between 9 and 10 lakhs prior to my joining. Most of the sale was done via dealers who played a major role is sale of products. Our company had Godown in Delhi.
According to the rules; first dealer should give orders and then bills were prepared. These bills were sent to Godown from where they were dispatched. Dealers are expected to keep stock of all the standard and fast moving sizes. But in Delhi most of the times dealers followed the shortcut. They used to go to Godown and take the goods on slip( called Challan). Copy of this Challan is then sent to office where a bill is made on its basis. This system was not recommended usually because dealers ceased to give orders and treat the Godown as hardware shop. This system also discouraged dealers to stock the goods. It was responsibility of Engineer to see to it that the goods are properly stocked in Godown. If any particular size is not available then Engineer is expected to put a request through SAP called Indent. When Indent is made the required size is sent to that godown(from where indent is generated) from manufacturing facility of the company.

Problems:
Initially I faced many problems due to weak understanding of system. The problems are as under:

1) SAP was very complex. Extracting correct data from the system required good practice. For eg: In order to remove the list of sizes available in stock there were many parameters that had to be inserted. If the billing has to be done for a particular dealer; then it was more complex because Tax, VAT, discounts and other parameters came into the picture. Also the process of retrieving data from SAP is very slow.
2) The range of solid carbide cutting tools in use in the northern market was very high. It is a pain for an Engineer to maintain exact stock of all the sizes which are in use. There are near about more than 150 different sizes of End Mills and Drills. Tracking all the sizes and listing the sizes whose quantity are not adequate is a bit difficult.
3) Dealers usually don’t support much. May be this was case with me since I was new to the region. After sometime of working Sales Engineer develops rapport with the dealer and things go smoothly thereafter. But in my case; dealers were a true nightmare. If any size was not available in market they call insist on its delivery as soon as possible.
4) After joining the Delhi office I realized that godown is half empty. All the deficient sizes should be indented as soon as possible.
5) Sluggish delivery and logistics.

Real Work:

After studying the working of Forbes group and history of sales of Solid Carbide I realized that we are not able to meet demands of Dealers (or Market). Most of the sizes of Solid Carbide I weren’t able to supply within time limits. The deliveries of most of the sizes use to take more than 2 weeks which was too slow in the competitive market. The sale of Solid Carbide, as I had mentioned before, was around 10 lakhs/month. According to my calculations if the entire demands of the dealers are met, then the sale would increase by more than 50%. Also once I was advised by one of the manager Mr Patkar, that more tools you are able to provide the dealers, more sale you will be able to achieve. But as an Engineer I cannot order a very large quantity and stuff the godown with material. Most of the special sizes had to be manufactured and stored in very low quantity as their consumption was very low (5 pcs/month) and few sizes; especially standard sizes had good consumption (about 70 pcs/month). Differentiating sizes according to their consumption was again very difficult and time consuming. I came to know later that SAP gives data of consumption of cutting tool of a particular size in previous month. But on checking I came to know that it does not give number but gives the value of sale of that size in Rupees. Again it can be used but it may give erroneous data as most of the time a particular size was sold at different discounts and prices to dealers. If you order more than what is required then it added to dead stock which should not happen.
For e.g.: 20mm long reach End Mill of 2 Flute has consumption of max. 5 nos in a month. If we manufacture and stock 20 Nos of this size then it means that it will be a dead stock for 2 months.
In this manner consumption of different sizes varied from 5, 20, 30 to 80 Pcs/month.

Development of my Clerical skills:

The real job of an engineer is to be on field and develop business for company. In the beginning I did not get time to work on field due to inventory problems. I mostly concentrated how to keep inventory up to date and meet all the demands of dealers. I started working on this issue by maintaining an excel sheet of all the major sizes used, along with their monthly consumption. Also by this time dealers used to constantly call and keep on reminding about number of sizes which were either deficient or nil in godown. I used make regular indent of these sizes and sent it to our manufacturing facility. It is during this time I encountered a harsh fact. Even after computerization and SAP implementation, an Engineer had to follow manufacturing personals constantly. According to rules once the indent is generated by SAP the required material had to be sent to the godown from where indent was generated. But it rarely happened. Most of the time the required size used to be available in manufacturing unit even then it is not dispatched against the indent. An Engineer is then supposed to follow constantly for every single size of tool (out of more than 150 sizes). With my experience I worked out how much time it takes for a material to reach Delhi godown and then I planned accordingly. I prepared a detailed Excel sheet with all the data and with excel tools I modified it to suit my purpose. At last the labour paid and I was able to make a system that directly projected the number of sizes deficient in godown. I did this by using the excel sheet I prepared and imposing it on CSV file downloaded from SAP which gave the net stock available in godown.


Result:

The more you provide; more sale you will achieve. The key to increasing sale in Delhi market is to provide material on time ie. Better inventory management. This proved to be correct with consistently increasing sale of Solid Carbide Tools. Approx. Sale figures are given below (figures inclusive of excise duties):

July = 11 lakhs
August = 15 lakhs
September = 18 lakhs

In this period no major client was added. Increase in sale was achieved with the same clients and user base.


After word:

I left Forbes Gokak Ltd in Mid October to join ZERO.COM as a Business analyst. ZERO.COM is an Australian based company that specializes in CRM and business forecasting software.