FigJam Field Sales

Field sales representatives visiting retail stores across multiple cities — the reference deployment covered outlets in Harare and Bulawayo — were still running visits on paper order books and manual price checks. A rep would walk into a store, hand-write a stock count, negotiate an order verbally, and carry a paper form back to the office for someone else to key into the system days later.

This created two compounding problems. First, price and stock visibility was always stale — head office had no real-time read on what competitors were charging on shelf or what was actually in stock at "Choppies City" or "Store One" until a rep's paperwork was manually processed. Second, order accuracy suffered at the point of capture: line-item quantities, subtotals, VAT, and total weight/volume calculations done by hand or on a calculator introduced errors that showed up as disputes days later, after the truck had already shipped.

Every day running on paper meant slower order-to-fulfillment cycles, no audit trail tying a specific order to a specific store manager's approval, and zero structured data feeding back into merchandising or pricing decisions. For a distribution business operating across multiple currencies and regions, that lag was a direct cost to working capital and shelf competitiveness.

Any digital replacement had to work reliably in low-connectivity retail environments — many stores had unreliable Wi-Fi or cellular signal — meaning the app had to capture a full visit (photos, surveys, orders, signature) offline and sync cleanly once connectivity returned.

FigJam replaced a paper-based field sales process with a structured, offline-capable app that captures orders, stock levels, and competitor pricing at the moment a rep is standing in the store. Signed digital orders gave the distribution team an audit trail that didn't exist before, and centralized survey data gave merchandising a real-time view of shelf conditions across regions.

Illustrative post-rollout metrics: order processing time from store visit to warehouse dropped from days to hours, order-entry errors fell sharply once calculations moved server-side and client-verified, and price survey completion rates rose as the badge-and-alert system made new requests impossible to miss. Next on the roadmap is route optimization to sequence store visits automatically based on priority and location.