A Front-Line Complaint about Digital Systems
Manager Liu supervised a region for a leading food and beverage brand. When asked whether the company's sales force automation system helped front-line salespeople, he had a long list of frustrations.
The Chinese New Year peak season was under way. After three years of pandemic disruption, that holiday market felt especially important.
From the perspective of a front-line supervisor, Liu believed the company had reached a critical moment for converting demand into sales. Sales representatives should focus on closing orders rather than completing routine store visits. Performance management should therefore emphasize conversion rate and sales volume.
He gave an example. A salesperson might have dozens of key accounts in a territory. The most sensible action would be to suspend the normal route plan, win orders from those key accounts first, then maintain and replenish the remaining customers.
That approach fit the reality of the market—but violated almost every rule in the SFA system.
The system required the representative to follow a daily route, complete the same standard eight-step visit at every store, and spend 15 to 30 minutes at each location.
Liu knew that a meaningful discussion with one important outlet might require two or three hours and could generate an order worth more than RMB 10,000. Yet such a visit violated the system design, and every deviation reduced the employee's score.
Liu faced an impossible choice. Should he let the sales team work according to market reality, or should he ignore that reality and follow the system exactly?
If he chose the market, the performance system treated his people unfairly. If he chose the system, he failed the trust the company had placed in him.
His employer was not an unknown company. It was a major industry leader with revenue in the tens of billions of renminbi and a relatively successful record of digital transformation. According to Liu, however, similar conflicts occurred on the front line every day.
From a management perspective, digitalization is inevitable. Decision-making is almost impossible without it. But from a business perspective, digitalization often creates a burden rather than empowerment. It wastes time and energy without producing value.
As a middle manager, I frequently face situations in which system requirements contradict the market. I am caught between the two and have no practical solution.
The Fundamental Conflict: Flexibility Meets Standardization
Manager Liu represented a group, not an isolated case. His Chinese New Year problem was only one of hundreds of conflicts created by digitalization.
New Distribution primarily visits high-performing companies, and almost all of them report some version of this problem.
If even strong companies struggle, then China's FMCG digital transformation still contains an unresolved structural question:
When the standardized requirements of a digital system conflict with the flexibility of marketing work, what should the company do?
Is it a technology problem, a human problem, or a management problem?
Without deeper analysis, the conflict between digital transformation and front-line marketing will only become more frequent and more severe.
1. Management's Understanding of Digitalization
Senior management—and ultimately the CEO—sets the direction of digital transformation.
Yet the managers of many large companies are now far removed from front-line work. Even when a senior executive visits the market, the stores, people, and expected answers may have been arranged in advance.
Front-line frustration therefore rarely reaches the CEO directly. If a complaint does reach the top, it may already have been interpreted through several organizational layers and recast as evidence that the sales organization is resisting transformation.
Why do distributors refuse to use a manufacturer's system, even when the manufacturer asks only for a data connection?
What would persuade distributors to share at least part of their data?
Why must a salesperson use one system to place orders during the day, then enter the same information into the manufacturer's system at night?
Why is only 60 percent of the system data trusted? Why can salespeople still falsify data?
Do employees want to falsify it, or are the manufacturer's KPIs detached from business reality?
A CEO cannot answer these questions through formal reporting alone. Senior leaders must conduct substantial direct observation and listen to the real voices of sales representatives, supervisors, and distributors.
The idea that “wisdom lives on the front line” is especially important in digital transformation. Senior management has to enter the field to resolve these persistent problems.
2. The CIO's Understanding of Digitalization
Digital systems are built around standardization and process. Front-line marketing is often flexible, variable, and uncertain.
When standardization meets constant change, an incorrect understanding at the CIO level inevitably traps the transformation between incompatible demands.
Luo Xu, founder of CRM provider ShareCRM, framed it as a question of accountability. Many digital-transformation departments are held accountable for the form of the transformation rather than its business outcome.
Genki Forest CIO Huang Xiaofeng similarly argued that digital transformation must be business-driven, not technology-driven.
Discussing Genki Forest's route-to-market digitalization, he described the central lesson as realizing how far the technology team had once been from the business.
The CIO is both architect and implementer of digital change. If the CIO does not place the business at the center and accept responsibility for outcomes, the transformation is likely to struggle.
3. Balancing Standards and Flexibility Is Still a Technology Problem
Once management and the CIO have the right understanding, the central practical challenge becomes clear:
How can the company construct a digital foundation that contains system standards while remaining flexible, serves current needs while adapting to future change, and does both without collapsing into disorder?
Professional expertise matters.
Even a very large company should not assume that internal R&D can solve every technology problem. This is not primarily a question of technical strength; it is a question of direction and accumulated experience.
The best doctors become capable by treating large numbers of cases. Strong third-party technology providers similarly accumulate cases, solve recurring problems, and turn the experience into products.
Companies often believe their problem is unique. In reality, capable service providers have encountered and solved most digital technology and implementation challenges before.
Genki Forest took a pragmatic approach. Buying and building were simply two delivery options; the decision depended on value for money.
If the capability lay in an undeveloped space, the company would build it. If it was already a mature and competitive category, the company would buy a product that required limited customization, could be deployed quickly, and was simple to operate.
At one point, Genki Forest made what it called a painful decision: it abandoned a store-inspection 2.0 system that had been under development for a long time.
The company split the solution into an internally built distributor integration platform and selected functions purchased from ShareCRM. It then performed secondary development around its own needs, solving specific business scenarios and problems.
That pragmatic attitude and technology-selection path offer a useful reference for other FMCG companies.
Three Capabilities of a Digital Foundation
Bo Chuanchuan, head of FMCG product R&D at ShareCRM, argued that the apparent contradiction between marketing operations and digital response has a simple cause:
The digital system evolves more slowly than the business changes.
Neither business teams nor IT teams can predict the direction of every change in FMCG.
Using an IT system designed around yesterday's requirements to solve today's changing business is like marking the place where a sword fell into a river, then later searching at the mark after the boat has moved.
Across FMCG, a familiar pattern appears. A company buys or builds a system around current requirements. The business changes, new functions accumulate, and what began as a clean structure becomes increasingly tangled.
Eventually, the system can no longer support new requirements. After only three or four years, the company tears it down and starts again.
This recurring “replace it every three years” cycle is a form of digital ill health.
It is essentially entropy inside a static digital system. Because the company cannot predict change—and change continues to accelerate—it repeatedly rebuilds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in Antifragile that wind extinguishes a candle but feeds a fire. Randomness, uncertainty, and chaos should be used rather than avoided.
The fundamental answer is a living digital system.
Such a system is not built to solve only several predefined business problems. It provides a toolbox with which the company can solve emerging problems quickly.
It does not merely provide a wrench. It provides the machine tool capable of making the wrench that the business needs.
With that living system, a company can respond to a specific pain point by assembling a specific tool. It can support operations and decisions at the speed the business requires.
This is the core idea behind a new generation of digital systems and an approach already adopted by a number of large FMCG companies.
A System That Changed within One Week
During pandemic controls, many sales representatives were isolated at home and could not complete physical store visits. SFA data stopped, and businesses that depended on it could no longer operate normally.
Many managers treated this as unavoidable. If people could not leave home, how could they perform store visits?
The real competitive danger appears when one company cannot respond but another can.
After sudden isolation affected its employees, one major FMCG company launched a telephone-visit function within a week.
The salesperson could not visit a store, but could still make a call. The new capability supported telephone selling, automatically recorded the interaction, and connected the data with the existing SFA history. The business resumed quickly.
That responsiveness came from management insight and the courage to break convention. It also depended on having a living digital system.
The external environment changed. Management changed its approach. The system then changed with it.
Failing to predict the pandemic was normal. Failing to adapt the supporting system after the environment and management model had changed was not.
Why could this company respond so quickly? Because flexibility had been part of the system's mission from the beginning.
The living system was an FMCG application platform as a service—an aPaaS foundation designed to face the future and respond rapidly.
It relied on three core capabilities.
Capability One: Modular Business Components
Business components work like building blocks. A company can assemble them quickly into a distinctive operating process.
Compared with one-off custom development, a standardized provider can combine the management practices of thousands of customers, turn each useful function into a product, and deliver it as a standard component.
The system can contain many components that combine as needed: visit actions, store tags, store profiles, and many others.
A standard component is not introduced casually. It is refined through use across many FMCG customers.
Each component is kept small while the platform provides enough components to cover varied needs. This supports flexibility without sacrificing system structure or security.
When the business changes, the company can rearrange the building blocks instead of rebuilding the entire system.
Capability Two: A Visual Workflow Designer
The second capability is visual, what-you-see-is-what-you-get workflow design that takes effect quickly.
Users can adjust a business system by dragging and arranging components.
The living system provides not only building blocks and preassembled basic capabilities, but also workbenches for building higher-level FMCG processes.
The design remains visual throughout. That lowers difficulty and accelerates delivery.
When management needs a different operating process, the designer reflects the adjustment and shows the resulting business capability immediately.
Visual operation also makes errors easier to identify, allowing the company to build or modify a process as naturally as sketching an idea on paper.
Capability Three: Low-Code Extension for the Last Mile
Even the strongest public transportation network cannot reach every destination. Travelers often use a bicycle for the last mile.
Digital systems face the same problem. A living platform may be highly flexible, but some edge cases still require specialized behavior.
Low-code development provides that last mile.
The company can insert a small piece of code at a critical point to satisfy a specific requirement, with the change taking effect quickly.
Cloud computing, big data, and mature PaaS platforms make this kind of system possible. Earlier generations of technology could not offer the same confidence in dealing with uncertainty.
The article cites companies including Genki Forest, Mengniu, Orion, Tianjin Guanfang, Dezhuang, Fumao, Dayao, and Three Squirrels Seeds as users of ShareCRM's aPaaS capabilities to support rapidly changing front-line work.
Turn Uncertainty into an Advantage
The only constant is change.
Digital operations will face more uncertainty, moving faster and arriving in more forms.
The company that can adapt its system more quickly and keep pace with the business has a much better chance of succeeding in digital transformation.
For that company, uncertainty becomes a competitive advantage.
That is more than digital-transformation success. It is an important step toward an antifragile business.