Résumé

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 sales, and finance. Beyond that, 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.

Présentation générale

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 Blue RGM’s Planner module, 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.

Background: One Company, Two Markets 

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.

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 Blue RGM, Perfetti Van Melle sought a platform to enable a single source of truth across the enterprise.

Good Decisions, Weak Handoffs, & Big Gaps

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.

What the handoffs looked like 

• Trade spend approval and reconciliation took weeks. Promotions were typically analyzed retrospectively, after they had ended, which meant the window to intervene was already closed. 

• Traditional trade spend was essentially a black box. Budgets were allocated, but actual redemption rates remained unknown for months. 

• Manual claim reconciliation produced a high rate of calculation errors and duplicate payments. 

• Because no function could see what the others were executing, underperforming campaigns continued unabated. 

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.

The Key Takeaway 

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.

Read Part 2 to learn how Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia transformed their trade system to get beyond the noise and eliminate leakage.

À propos d'UpClear

UpClear est une société de logiciels et l'éditeur de Blue, une plateforme d'intelligence utilisée par les marques de biens de consommation. Nous proposons une solution globale de gestion de la croissance du chiffre d'affaires, comprenant des fonctionnalités pour la gestion des prix (TPM), la gestion des offres (TPO), la planification intégrée des stocks (IBP) et la gestion de la croissance du chiffre d'affaires (RGM). Notre mission est de donner aux marques les moyens d'optimiser leurs performances en matière de chiffre d'affaires et le retour sur investissement de leurs actions commerciales grâce à un logiciel intelligent et collaboratif, offrant une source unique de données fiables, une automatisation rationalisée et des informations exploitables.

La plateforme Blue RGM Intelligence prend en charge l'ensemble des processus de gestion des revenus, du brut au net : planification opérationnelle annuelle, planification des comptes et exécution. Les solutions s'appuient sur l'analyse de données, l'intelligence artificielle et la gestion des données, qui permettent de relier les équipes et les systèmes d'entreprise.