Bread is a popular food in the Western and most other societies including Asians. Bread provides equivalent balanced diet, comes quite handy when a quick meal is favored. It is not surprising that bread has become the most popular food for breakfast in families.

Indonesi`s milling and bakery industry is undersized for the size of its population. Per capita consumption is 4 kilograms (kg) of flour consumed by urban dwellers and 1.8 kg per annum by rural dwellers compared to about 45kg per annum in Japan. Indonesia offers great potential as a market for wheat-derived and other products.

NIC, a bakery manufacturer and distributor in Indonesia tries to capture this potential market and claims to be the market leader in the mas bread manufacturing industry. Freshness and availability at all times are the key factors for NIC to achieve such market leader position as it distributes the bread through three channels i.e. modern trade, traditional trade and institution. each distribution channel has its own challenges as there are no standards amongst them, how to measure agent`s performance and grow the market.



The writer decided to focus on the challenges at the traditional channel given to the facts that there is potential market in Indonesia regardless of the threats of the fast growing of modern trade. The group conducted survey at selected depots as the sampling areas by interviewing the agents, hawkers and customers which later also followed by benchmarking at other perishable items which use traditional channel as well.

The writer gathered the data from the survey, compared the performance of the most and least productive areas and collected the information of best practices at other industries dealing with perishable products. The data were then analyzed using some concepts such as performance measurement, overall inprovement model, effective business process, channel management and bechmarking. The result also gave actual findings compared to the hypotheses generated at the early part of the project.

Finally, the writer summarized all the analyzes and gave the recommendations to NIC which were the role model of an agent, a simulation program of monitoring agents namely NICAMS and some initiatives on how to create competitive edge for traditional channel.





Research Location : P.T. Nippon Indosari Corpindo



Confidential until 2011