Dealer sell-out report late or inconsistent with allocated IMEIs

The workflow

The brand’s sell-out cut-off comes round, the dealers’ stock cards arrive late and in their own formats, and what they report as sold does not add up against the IMEIs the distributor allocated to them.

What happens today

Brands run this channel on sell-in and sell-out. A brand’s own sales team is measured on the sell-in and sell-through of its distributors and sub-distributors and on the allocation of stock to dealers, so the distributor in the middle has to say, on the brand’s schedule, which of the units it was shipped have been sold and by whom. The cut-off in this story is weekly.

The dealers do not report on the brand’s form: a stock card is a photo of a ledger page, a screenshot of a spreadsheet, or a Viber message that says “nabenta na yung 3 na Note, isa pa yung C-series” — each dealer in its own format, on its own clock. A coordinator at the distributor copies each one into the sheet the brand accepts, chases the dealers who have not sent, and submits what is there by the cut-off, whether or not it reconciles. Distributors run their own systems, and to everyone outside them each one is a black box; that is how a vendor of distributor software describes the Philippine FMCG channel, and the phone channel in this story is written the same way.

The stakes are not only the brand’s goodwill. The NTC has required phone dealers to submit a monthly list of the IMEIs they hold since 2004, and the stock in the channel is carried at the distributor’s risk, not the brand’s. A unit that appears sold in two dealers’ reports, or that was allocated and never appears anywhere, is a unit the distributor paid for and cannot account for.

What ordinary rules handle

Most of this is a list against a list and a clock, and we build it as ordinary rules, because ordinary rules are cheaper to run, easy to check, and behave the same way next cut-off.

• Holding the IMEIs allocated to each dealer from the sell-in shipment, and marking each one sold, on hand, or unaccounted for as the reports come in.
• Flagging any IMEI reported sold by two dealers, sold twice by one, or reported sold by a dealer it was never allocated to.
• Counting down to the cut-off: reminding each dealer who has not sent, on a schedule, in the thread they already use, and listing who is still outstanding an hour before.
• Assembling the brand’s report from the reconciled units in whatever form the brand takes it — a portal upload or a spreadsheet — and holding it as a draft until a person releases it.

Where the assistant follows through

This is the part we call follow-through: the assistant checks the records, prepares the action, routes it, chases the reply, and raises what it cannot settle.

What rules cannot do is read a photograph of a handwritten stock card, or work out that “3 na Note” in a dealer’s message means three units of one model and that their IMEIs are on the ledger photo sent an hour earlier. AI reads the message and the photo and makes that call, and it is a smaller part of the job than it sounds.

1. Each dealer’s message becomes a draft sell-out line. The photo, the screenshot, or the sentence is read into units and IMEIs and set against that dealer’s allocation. Draft, because nothing has been submitted yet.
2. The report is reconciled against allocated IMEIs. What each dealer says it sold is set against what it was given. The units that reconcile are done; the rest are the work.
3. Units sold twice, or never, are flagged with their evidence attached. The two messages that both claim one IMEI, or the allocation line for a unit no report has ever mentioned, travel with the exception, so the next person to look at it is not re-doing the check. Those two cases are the ones this story assumes the channel produces.
4. The dealers who have not sent are chased. The reminder goes out on schedule, in each dealer’s own thread, and the list of who is still outstanding is kept for the person who will decide what to do about them, instead of being built by hand at four in the afternoon.
5. What cannot be reconciled is raised rather than submitted. A stock card that cannot be read, a unit two dealers both claim, or a cut-off that arrives with reports outstanding goes to the person who owns the brand relationship, with the draft report and the gaps listed.

Where a person decides

Which dealers to call, and what to submit to the brand while gaps are still open, is the sales manager’s call, and the assistant cannot take it. It prepares the report up to that point and stops there — not because a check failed, but because that is where the line was drawn when the workflow was built.

A sell-out report is the distributor’s word to the brand about where the brand’s units went, and the assistant does not give that word. The report goes with the name of the person who released it and the list of what was still open when they did. A month later, the question “why did we report that unit sold, and who decided to” has an answer.