What Is Beat Planning and When Should You Use It?

Beat planning or permanent journey plan is a day-level route plan made for field sales/marketing personnel to make visits to a number of stores at a predefined frequency. A beat plan defines whom to visit, when to visit, based on the company’s priorities on stores category/segment. Effective beat planning is essential for FMCG retailers and brands to be able to keep stores sufficiently stocked with in-demand merchandise and replenish them at regular intervals.

While sales beat planning is generally done manually, when handling multiple locations and hundreds of product categories, it poses some serious real-world challenges.

• Fuzzy, incomplete, and incorrect addresses of the retail outlets is a major issue while planning sales beats
• Poor communication between retail storekeepers and warehouse managers may lead to improper beat planning
• Mapping specific vehicles to a specific category of products and specific geographical regions is also part of the planning process
• On-ground constraint such as salesman’s geographical understanding, route restrictions, traffic congestions, etc. can affect a permanent journey plan
• Salesmen often face the issue of unfair load balancing in terms of the number of retailer visits, distance traveled and time spent on the road.

How Locus helps FMCG retailers with efficient beat planning

Automated beat planning | Accurate rider allocation | Increased serviceability ratio | Smart routing for Permanent Journey Plans | Analytics and insights