In this case study, we’ll explore how Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia turned disconnected trade spend into a repeatable margin management discipline. Margin pressure in FMCG is no longer episodic, it is the operating environment. Margin leakage does not come from a single bad decision, it lives in the handoffs between procurement, pricing, promotion, trade marketing and finance, and it only surfaces weeks after the window to take action has closed.
This installment, the first of two articles, covers the initial difficulties that the confectionary brand faced in managing its portfolio of customers and systems across Indonesia’s disjointed landscape.
Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia operates in a market where national modern trade retailers sit alongside hundreds of thousands of fragmented traditional trade “mom & pop” outlets. For years the company ran trade spend the way most FMCG players in developing markets do, through disconnected spreadsheets owned by different teams. Each individual decision was defensible; the combined result was not.
Working with UpClear to deploy BluePlanner- part of the BlueRGM platform- the company moved from manual, Excel-based trade spend management to a systemized, data-driven approach. The transformation is not simply a technology story, but an organizational structural lesson. A lesson where loops were closed on cross-department handoffs where margin had been quietly leaking and commercial teams were provided a foundational consensus forecast that pricing, promotion and trade decisions all draw upon before anything hit the store shelf.
Indonesia is a textbook illustration of why a single commercial model cannot cover a modern FMCG portfolio. On one side, modern trade chains offer rich POS data, predictable execution, sophisticated buyers and measurable outcomes. On the other, traditional trade spans thousands of warungs and ‘mom & pop’ shops where data is scarce, order sizes are small, and execution varies outlet by outlet.
| Dimension | Modern Trade | Traditional Trade |
| Structure | National chains, consolidated | Hundreds of thousands of outlets, fragmented |
| Data availability | Rich POS and syndicated data | Scarce, often unreported |
| Key lever | Promo ROI, price ladders, long-term trading agreements | Numeric distribution, in-stock, price compliance |
| Source of advantage | Insight and negotiation | System designed for efficient execution |
| Planning tolerance | Rewards precision and complexity | Punishes complexity in execution |
The strategic mistake many manufacturers make is applying the same commercial model across these very different routes to market. Consolidated markets reward joint business planning, category management and advanced analytics. Fragmented markets are constrained by operational reality, where numeric distribution, in-stock rates and price compliance matter more than sophisticated promo mechanics. Executing both well, from the same planning and execution systems, is the harder problem. In BluePlanner, Perfetti Van Melle sought a platform to enable a single source of truth across the enterprise.
“The Perfetti partnership with UpClear and application usage of BluePlanner marked the transformation from manual management of trade promos, becoming a system and data-based trade spend management process. Using BluePlanner, the team is now empowered with standardized workflows and same data set necessary, which at the end improves data consolidation for data-based decision making for commercial teams.”
– Putu Ayu Mas Amanda Pratiwi, Trade Marketing Manager, Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia
Before the transformation, Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia managed trade spending through decentralized, spreadsheet-based process. Disconnected files lived across the email inboxes of territory sales managers, key account managers, distributors, trade marketing and finance. Each team could defend its own numbers. With no single source of truth, none of them were looking at the same numbers.
Pricing teams move to recoup cost. Commercial teams fund deals to protect volume. Each action was rational on its own. Combined, and without shared visibility and transparency, they quietly cancelled each other out. The leakage was not caused by any single bad decision; it was caused by the absence of a connective layer between good ones.
No bad actors, just broken connective tissue – when margin comes into view, the instinct is to look for the bad call. Most of the time, every decision was defensible on its own. The leakage is structural and lives in the gaps between business functions.
Reading Part 2 to learn how Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia transformed their trade system to get beyond the noise and eliminate leakage.
At UpClear, our mission is to empower Consumer Goods brands to maximize revenue performance and trade investment returns through intelligent, collaborative software—providing a single source of truth, streamlined automation, and actionable insights.
The Blue RGM Intelligence Platform supports end-to-end processes, from Annual Operating Planning to Account Planning and Execution.
