Kiran Gali, Founder and CEO of NumberMall, speaks with FoodService India about their digital platform, its services, and the ease of bringing brands and retailers together, digitally.
Give a brief description of your company, its products and services and line of business?
NumberMall is a digital supply chain technology platform for F&G brands. NumberMall help brands to digitize their retailer network and integrate the supply chain capabilities with their existing distribution network on its platform along with the last mile fulfillment infrastructure support.
How NumberMall is a great business solution for F&G Brands? What value do they find in digitizing their supply chain?
Brands connected with their retailers, digitally, is a convenience for both. It helps to scale fast and reduce costs, significantly. Digitization helps in collaborating and communicating better in real time. And distribution experience is more accurate and scalable after going digital.
Which are the pain areas in F&G supply chain that your platform helps to reduce for brands and retailers?
Brands have to employ a large sales force in order to reach retailers leading to slower scale-up, distributor and sales team attrition causes significant disruption in operations leading to lost sales. Due to stores being offline, there is a lack of real-time data for planning and supply chain. Lack of on-demand experience leads to losing the sales for the brand. Retailers are forced to buy in bulk and bear high inventory holding costs to avoid stock-outs and regular stock-outs of various SKUs due to infrequent and inflexible sales team visits. Retailers do not have the online access to the brand’s supply chain stocks and have to wait for the brand’s sales force to collect orders as per the brands beat plan not as and when the stocks are required by the retailers.
How easy or difficult was it to convince small retailers to embrace your platform initially and at what moment did you feel that the app has finally been able to gain traction?
Brands are, only, on board as part of their digitization strategy for their growth. Due to the flexibility and transparency, most retailers are active and transact regularly.
Tell us about your e-distribution model and strategy.
Our e-distribution fulfillment with last mile delivery infrastructure and capabilities helps brands to penetrate the markets better and faster. We expand our e-distribution fulfilment infrastructure with respect to brands network reach.
Please explain your business model? Do you own your own logistics?
NumberMall has brands, distributors and retailers on its platform. We provide infrastructure fulfilment to the retailer directly with logistics. Retailers will have access to the distributor’s stocks and also alternatively fulfillment center stocks directly. Retailers never miss the supply link from the brands and service.
How do you ensure that in providing the services to the retailers, you are able to offer them the best rates for your services that is better than other B2B logistics providers?
NumberMall is a tech platform with logistic service capabilities and we never try to control the brand selling prices to the retailer. Retailer prices, trade schemes, and stocks are controlled and operated by the brands.
What is the nature of analytics that you provide to the brands and how does it help them to strengthen their relationships with their consumers?
NumberMall is an online real-time transactional and collaborative platform for brands and retailers. The platform helps in visualizing any kind of data viewpoint in real time with an intuitive design. The platform helps to strengthen the relationship between the brand and retailers with the real-time inventory stock positions, pricing, schemes, offers, ratings, reviews, off-take predictions, and recommended stocks.
What are the attributes that FMCG companies look at in their distributors?
Investment, service, and credit.
What limits or prevents NumberMall to extend its platform and services to supermarkets or to other retail categories like restaurants?
There are no limitations to NumberMall. We serve the supermarkets and restaurants where every brand takes us and we are happy to serve those outlets.
Tell us about your current phase of development? How many retailers have you tied up so far and what has been the rate of expansion on this front?
NumberMall is investing heavily in its tech and addressing every gap when it comes to digitization. We want digitization for every brand to create an uninterrupted supply chain experience for them. We have 20,000 retailers on our platform and are growing at a rate of 20 percent monthly.
What is the market size you are looking to tap and which regions are of interest to you? Which are the challenges that will test the efficacy and popularity of your platform?
Branded FMCG is around US$ 60 billion market size in India, NumberMall is expanding across India. Our fulfillment capabilities are currently in Hyderabad and expanding our fulfillment centers to top 100 cities in India by 2023. Expanding the fulfillment capabilities into the fresh and cold storage product categories are the current challenges in front of us, we will address this in future as we strengthen our footprint into the major markets and major categories.
