What Good Looks Like
- One business objective, such as improving availability of a short must-stock list, with a named owner.
- A baseline for 2 or 3 outcomes, with known data gaps written down.
- Pilot territories that reflect real variety: store formats, distances, access, and performance.
- Reps and managers involved in design and testing, not only told the result.
- A written decision at each 30-day gate.
When to Use It and Common Failure Patterns
Use this plan for a new FieldKo rollout, a new region, or a major change to how visits, surveys, or exceptions work. Common failure patterns:- Big-bang rollout. Every store and rep changes at once, so problems multiply.
- Disputed definitions. Teams don’t agree what in-stock, authorized, visited, or resolved mean.
- Dashboards before workflow. A survey produces attractive charts but frustrates the reps who complete it.
- Easy pilot stores. The pilot works only because it used the best territories.
- Scaling broken basics. Sync problems or unowned exceptions are rolled out to the whole team.
Operating Procedure
Days 1 to 30: Understand and Design
- Interview reps, area managers, commercial teams, and retailer-facing staff. Shadow real visits.
- Map how stores are chosen, how call cycles are planned, what’s surveyed, what evidence is taken, who owns issues, and how reporting works.
- Agree the business objective, the pilot stores, and the product scope.
- Write a short metric dictionary, and agree what in-stock, authorized, visited, and resolved mean.
- Record a baseline for 2 or 3 outcomes.
- List the most time-consuming field tasks that add little value.
Days 31 to 60: Pilot in Real Conditions
- Run a short standard visit, the must-stock list, a few priority metrics, and an exception process in the pilot territories.
- Train reps and supervisors, and watch how long visits really take.
- Count incomplete or ambiguous answers, and check a sample of evidence.
- Run a weekly exception review.
- Fix the design quickly instead of waiting for a formal review.
Days 61 to 90: Stabilize and Scale Deliberately
- Compare pilot results with the baseline and with similar stores outside the pilot.
- Review data confidence: sync timeliness, completeness, and evidence quality.
- Refine store tiers, task lists, and resourcing.
- Set change control for questions, products, campaigns, and metric definitions.
- Train supervisors to run short weekly reviews.
- Plan a staged expansion by region or store segment.
Stop Signs
Pause expansion if any of these is true:- Records aren’t syncing reliably.
- Reps can’t complete the workflow within real visit times.
- Scorecard denominators are still disputed.
- Nobody is accountable for exceptions.
How to Implement It in FieldKo
For the technical setup, follow the Implementation Checklist. This table shows where each pilot step happens in FieldKo.Fictional Example
Fictional example: a made-up snack company, Redwood Pantry, pilots in 3 territories with 12 reps and 180 stores. The objective is availability of 15 must-stock products.- Day 30 baseline: reps check 15 products in each of the 180 stores, 2,700 checks in all. 2,322 are present, so observed on-shelf availability (OSA) is 2,322 ÷ 2,700 = 86%.
- Day 45: visit times run 12 minutes over plan, because the pilot survey has 40 questions. The team cuts it to 18.
- Day 60 gate: the same 2,700 checks show 2,457 present, so observed OSA is 91%. Sync Details show 2 reps with repeated failed syncs, which the admin fixes before the next gate.
- Day 90 gate: results hold, weekly reviews run without the central analyst, and the team approves expansion to 2 more territories.
What to Measure
What to Do When It Goes Wrong
Checklist
- Name a sponsor, a program owner, and the pilot region.
- Write the business objective, baseline metric, and success criteria.
- Agree the metric dictionary and the must-stock list.
- Set up the pilot in a sandbox, then in production, using the implementation checklist.
- Choose representative pilot territories.
- Run weekly exception reviews from day 31.
- Record a decision at each gate.
- Check the stop signs before any expansion.