Sharing experience, the key factor for THP Group's development
	Tran Ngoc Bich- the energetic leader and gentle wind beneath THP Group’ wings
	China suggests Italy may be the birthplace of COVID-19 pandemic

Phuong Uyen Tran and her father. Photo: Forbes

Sales is another big area my father is always keen to have visibility, over. Until the early 2010s, no one really knew what the department was up to, or whether they were selling what they said where they sai. We counteracted this oversight by implementing a distribution management system (DMS), becoming the first Vietnamese company to do so.

This system has vastly improved our logistics and and intelligence (EMI). It has made it far easier to detect patternss and improve efficiency. All our sales invoices are now put into this system.

It also helps us to manage our inventory better. As a rule of thumb, it gets prohibitively expensive to maintain inventory cover above the 90 percent mark. THP does not do this, but we do try to maintain 100 percent inventory cover for our most popular brands. It is always a work in progress. But it is unusual for us to get caught short on key lines.

My father has a massive dashboard in his office where he can monitor what is being delivered and where on a daily basis. Trucks have GPS trackers. We even upload photos of the smallest shop onto the DMS. This not only helps us check whether the signage and advertising are correct but also whether the shop even exists.

He soon realized that a number of the photos were fakes, and about a year after we implemented the DMS, we hired seventy investigators to audit the sales team. For every fraud they uncovered, we promised to pay them 50 percent of the penalty we imposed.

Within one month, they had uncovered three hundred thousand misrepresentations by various members of the sales team. The responsible person was fined the equivalent of about $10 per fraud. Some team members ended up having to repay two to three months' salary.

By the second month, the number of frauds had dropped to 30,000, then 2,500 by month three, and only 300 by month four. By this time, none of the original sales team was left. They had either resigned or been fired.

This 100 percent turnover rate was replicated twice over before we finally found a team that understood crime does not pay. My father likes to quote a famous Asian proverb: "Sometimes you have to kill the chicken to scare the monkey."

Phuong Uyen Tran. Photo: Zingnews.vn

Integration of technology into your business is inevitable. Determining how and what to implement is what needs to be continually addressed. My father always knew as THP got bigger it would only be able to compete with the multinationals by deploying the same or better technology. Deploying technology can and will always feel like a bold investment. If not done strategically, it can be a source of financial and operational stress. However, if leveraged correctly, it can be a strategic differentiator amongst competitors and make things more efficient internally.

SOLUTION

A review of its existing decentralized Microsoft Dynamics unveiled THP’s reservations about the accuracy of the reported data, which were consolidated at the distributors’ end. With a server and client license required for each THP distributor, it also proved to be highly prohibitive cost-wise. There were also concerns with security and data integrity, as the same administrative password was used by its distributors for system access.

In 2013, THP decided to invest in a centralized platform to gain real-time visibility and accurate understanding of market demand, distributors’ sales performance and their capacity

Zero Degree Green Tea's immediate success The immediate success of Zero Degree Green Tea helped Tan Hiep Phat exceeded its twelve-month sales target within two months, following by many competitors followed ...

2008 - the booming year of Tan Hiep Phat Back in 2008 THP was the biggest advertiser in Vietnam. Tan Hiep Phat was everywhere: on billboards, on TV, in magazines, and all over social ...

Phuong Uyen Tran's father and mother harmonious traits: Yin and Yang building Tan Hiep Phat's success While Mr. Thanh Quy Tran is an extremely logical person who has visionary, full of ideas and always eager to experiment, Mrs. Nu Thi Pham ...