# Singapore ran the region. It could not see two of the countries it ran. — Radexus

> A regional headquarters with distributors in six markets reported one number to the group and had confidence in three of them. The two largest gaps were the two fastest-growing markets.

*Source: https://radexus.com/cases/singapore-lanes/*

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[Success stories](https://radexus.com/cases/)  /  Regional distribution

# Singapore ran the region. It could not see two of the countries it ran.

- Sector: **Regional distribution**
- Scale: **Singapore, ASEAN hub**
- Duration: **4 months measured**
- Number agreed: **Secondary sales visibility**

In this success story
- [Why this is not a reporting problem](#h-0)
- [What resolution had to handle](#h-1)
- [The result](#h-2)

A regional headquarters with distributors in six markets reported one number to the group and had confidence in three of them. The two largest gaps were the two fastest-growing markets.

The company distributes industrial consumables across ASEAN from a Singapore headquarters, selling through wholly owned operations in three markets and appointed distributors in three more. The group scorecard showed one regional revenue figure. It was accurate and it was almost useless, because it aggregated three markets the team could see into three they could not.

In Singapore and Malaysia, orders came through the ERP and secondary movement was visible. In Vietnam and Indonesia, the distributor sent a monthly spreadsheet in a format that changed whenever the person preparing it changed. In Thailand nobody could say with confidence how much of what had been shipped had actually sold.

## Why this is not a reporting problem

It is tempting to treat this as a compliance issue: make the distributors report properly. That approach had been tried twice and had failed twice, for the obvious reason that a distributor has no incentive to expose their own stock position to the principal.

So the definition we agreed with the regional CFO deliberately avoided requiring anything new from the distributors. **Outlets billed against outlets mapped, per market, per period**, computed from the shipping and invoicing records the headquarters already held, plus whatever distributor data arrived in whatever shape it arrived in.

**6**markets, one definition

**3**that had been effectively invisible

**22%**less stock sitting in the wrong market

## What resolution had to handle

Company names in three scripts, transliterated inconsistently. The same outlet appearing as a trading name in one file and a registered entity in another. Distributor spreadsheets where the header row moved between months. None of this is exotic in Southeast Asia and all of it defeats a conventional integration project, which is why the previous two attempts had stalled.

The extraction had to be tolerant rather than strict. A file that does not match the expected schema is not rejected, it is read, scored for confidence, and the low-confidence rows are queued for a person in Singapore to resolve. That queue took about two hours a week and shrank steadily as the patterns were learned.

**The regional lesson**In a market where your counterparty will not change their process for you, the system has to absorb the mess rather than demand it be cleaned up first. Every project that begins by asking distributors to standardise their reporting dies waiting.

## The result

Within four months all six markets reported on the same definition. The immediate commercial consequence was not a revenue increase, it was a reallocation: stock sitting in markets that were not moving it fell twenty-two percent at flat total inventory, and two distributor agreements were renegotiated with actual coverage data on the table for the first time.

The regional director's summary was that he had stopped arguing about whose numbers were right and started arguing about what to do, which he described as the first productive quarter in two years.

**Secondary sales visibility**Number agreed, outlets billed against mapped

**3 to 6 markets**Result at 4 months, reported on one definition

**Down 22%**Stock in the wrong market, at flat total inventory

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