---
title: "Human Efficiency Will Be the Biggest Bottleneck for FMCG Enterprises in the Future"
description: "This article discusses the issue of human efficiency in FMCG enterprises. Low human efficiency is manifested in three ways: low output, low work efficiency, and high interpersonal costs. The key to improving human efficiency lies in managing both the number of personnel and their average efficiency, with innovative solutions such as crowdsourcing and shared labor models."
author: "高级研究员 海游"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-01-14"
language: "en"
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# Human Efficiency Will Be the Biggest Bottleneck for FMCG Enterprises in the Future

> This article discusses the issue of human efficiency in FMCG enterprises. Low human efficiency is manifested in three ways: low output, low work efficiency, and high interpersonal costs. The key to improving human efficiency lies in managing both the number of personnel and their average efficiency, with innovative solutions such as crowdsourcing and shared labor models.

Today, let's talk about the issue of human efficiency in FMCG enterprises. From the perspective of performance and employee status, organizations with low human efficiency generally exhibit three manifestations:
First, low output, mainly measured by the performance created per person, where the work of two people is done by three or four; second, low work efficiency, where people show up but don't work hard, work hard but without results, and don't create value; third, high interpersonal costs, with departmentalism, internal strife, and internal friction.
These three manifestations are common and happen all the time. So the question arises: for FMCG enterprises, what is the true meaning of human efficiency, and what value should be used to measure it? It should be: Human Efficiency Value = Number of Personnel * Average Personnel Efficiency. Let's break down this formula step by step.
**Number of Personnel is the Foundation of Human Efficiency Value**
It's not hard to see that the FMCG industry today is facing a "personnel shortage" everywhere. From brand owners at the top of the supply chain to distributors and wholesalers at the bottom, they are almost always recruiting, never stopping.
From a macro perspective, the effects of the one-child policy are beginning to show, with the number of retirees starting to exceed the number of working-age people. From a micro perspective, FMCG is a labor-intensive industry. Unlike delivery drivers or couriers who simply make deliveries, FMCG requires more mental effort to facilitate transactions, but the average income is similar, making recruitment even harder.
In general, it is inevitable that FMCG labor costs are high.
On the other hand, as FMCG has developed, and even in the next five to ten years, the core means of offline operations will still rely on a "sea of people" strategy and deep distribution. This is certain because offline sales will still dominate FMCG in the next five to ten years.
From another dimension, humans have five sensory systems: hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. Online communication can only address hearing and sight, while offline experiences can satisfy all five senses. This leads to the key factor determining a company's human efficiency value: the number of personnel.
The number of personnel brings another contradiction: it directly leads to an increase in personnel costs and management costs. Enterprises also understand that as long as management doesn't lag behind, the more people, the better the market service. But FMCG competition has entered an era of meager profits, and the ability to bear personnel costs is limited.
Is there a compromise that meets the need for personnel numbers while reducing personnel costs? Let's take Xiaoling Technology's solution as an example.
Xiaoling Technology, with its independently developed **Ailingong APP** as a tool platform, provides an innovative service model—**crowdsourcing execution**—which can use professional third-party personnel to assist in supervision, inspection, and actual execution of simple terminal marketing activities, **solving the three major pain points between brand owners' personnel numbers and personnel costs:**
**Pain Point 1: Terminal Market Performance**
**Brand headquarters will formulate detailed market execution standards, but they are often difficult to achieve as expected. The essence lies in whether the execution is complete and fully implemented. Organizing one's own team to check this faces high costs and the problem of internal mutual tolerance. Third-party intervention is the best solution.
But traditional third-party market research companies are difficult to meet the increasingly refined management strategies of FMCG brand owners in terms of response speed and coverage breadth.
At this time, Xiaoling Technology can quickly form a sizable professional "inspection team" on its Ailingong crowdsourcing platform based on the brand owner's strategy, rapidly collect execution performance data from a wider range or lower-tier market terminals, and improve and optimize market management strategies and action plans.
**Pain Point 2: Result Inspection**
**Many companies will form their own inspection teams, but heavy investment in personnel costs yields little. The reason is simple: a company cannot have one person working while several people watch.
At this time, Xiaoling Technology can flexibly dispatch independent information collectors who have no connection to the brand enterprise through platform orders based on the brand owner's audit content, objectively and fairly assess the performance of frontline business personnel, and provide a data foundation for employee performance formulation and achievement.
**Pain Point 3: Timely Grasp of Opportunities**
**When discovering market opportunities, brand owners need a long cycle from organizing a project department to market research, to forming a plan, and finally to implementation. At this time, Xiaoling Technology's customized market research, relying on its advantages such as broad coverage network, deep reachable outlets, and rigorous collection processes, can provide more comprehensive and objective data references for corporate decision-making and business expansion.
FMCG has long entered an era of meager profits, and personnel investment is very cautious for distributors. Each additional employee for a distributor means they must sell an extra two to three thousand yuan of products every day to break even, not to mention the early recruitment, training costs, and losses from new employee turnover.
Take the most headache-inducing role for distributors—the merchandiser—as an example. They often face three situations:
**First, sales momentum is insufficient to support full-time on-site personnel. How to improve the product's distribution and display status in stores?**
**Second, frontline sales cannot routinely cover stores. How to quickly grasp out-of-stock information?**
**Third, how to truly increase efficiency and reduce costs through flexible employment?**
The only way to solve this problem is **shared merchandising, using their idle time to serve oneself while increasing the income of merchandisers**, killing two birds with one stone. Another important product of Xiaoling Technology—the shared merchandising service model—can better serve this purpose.
** _Summary:_** _The labor-intensive nature of the FMCG industry determines that the "sea of people" strategy will continue, especially for offline business. Without people, FMCG cannot be done, and the number of personnel and labor costs have always plagued brand owners._
_So can we boldly guess that Xiaoling Technology has already realized shared third-party inspection personnel, shared merchandisers, and other operational models to reconcile the contradiction between quantity and cost. In the future, will it realize a shared salesperson model across brand owners? This is worth discussing and researching._
**Personnel Efficiency is the Determining Factor of Human Efficiency Value**
At the beginning of the article, several phenomena were mentioned: the work of two people done by three or four, some people showing up but not working hard, not creating value, not producing results, departmentalism, severe internal friction, etc. These are all manifestations of extremely low personnel efficiency. This is easy to understand: no matter how many people a company has, if efficiency is zero, human efficiency is still zero.
So, under the premise that personnel have a correct attitude, improving personnel efficiency is particularly important. Let's take Baidu AI Cloud's several solutions for improving frontline personnel efficiency as an example.
**1. Improve the Efficiency of Frontline Operations Personnel**
**OCR text recognition for store signs can easily improve the work efficiency of operations personnel and achieve network completeness.**
First: The outlets served by business personnel are dynamically changing, with new openings, closures, and transfers. A daily task is the collection of terminal outlet information. Usually, collecting and entering one outlet's information takes 3 minutes. The tedious input makes operators extremely annoyed. If review is not strict, there may be dozens or hundreds of outlets in one area all named "Blue Classic: Dream Blue."
Such a system lacks care for frontline operators. With Baidu AI Cloud's technical support, the time for business personnel to enter outlet information can be greatly compressed, effective information extraction becomes more intelligent and efficient, and users feel more satisfied.
Let's look at another example: in densely populated outlet areas, frontline operators use the system to input storefront image information. Which photo is the "main storefront" and which is the "reference object"? With Baidu AI Cloud's technical support, this can be easily handled. Furthermore, frontline operators' information collection changes from "fill-in-the-blank" to "multiple-choice," making it more convenient and accurate.
**2. Improve the Efficiency of Frontline Audit Personnel**
**Manufacturer-customized anti-rephotography and anti-cross-shooting models can greatly improve recognition accuracy.**
If authenticity is not achieved, market expenses and personnel incentives are more terrifying than not giving them at all. The frontline inspection personnel in this link are more about fighting against counterfeit elements, letting good money drive out bad money, and purifying the market operation environment. The biggest difficulty in their work is rephotography (flat rephotography, on-site fraud) and cross-shooting (different outlets, misattribution).
Baidu AI Cloud's solutions are:
**1. Support manufacturer-customized exclusive anti-rephotography models, greatly improving the accuracy of rephotography recognition, safeguarding expenses and business;**
**2. Identify common cross-shooting fraud behaviors such as "different angles, slight movement, date tampering..." to ensure the efficiency of manufacturers' market expense usage.**
**In terms of human efficiency improvement**
**Baidu AI Cloud has reached the forefront**
Some time ago, the enterprise service platform Ailingong (Xiaoling Technology) received strategic investment from Baidu in the Pre-C round, with Gaohu Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor. So what is Baidu's purpose and original intention in investing in Xiaoling Technology?
It is understood that the core is: the offline market is still the main body of sales for China's FMCG industry in the next ten years, and it is still impossible to completely abandon deep distribution. The "sea of people" strategy will continue, but in reality, the labor costs for FMCG manufacturers are getting higher and higher.
Currently, there are already part-time promoters in the market, and distributor employees are even selling multiple brands. Driven by the sharing economy, sharing frontline business personnel is also one of the important topics facing manufacturers.
For the entire industry, Baidu AI Cloud, through Xiaoling Technology's precise information and standard services, is laying out the future sharing of frontline operations personnel, thereby assisting FMCG manufacturers in performance growth and organizational efficiency.
**Summary:**
**The needs of FMCG manufacturers are not just a system tool, but more importantly, the logic of terminal systems assisting product sales and the marketing management solutions for enterprise teams.**
Baidu AI Cloud has been committed to this work. From its investment in Xiaoling Technology, it can be seen that it has entered the digitalization market of offline distribution channels in the FMCG industry, and its determination and attitude to serve FMCG manufacturers.
**Are you "watching" me?**


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