Home Success Stories Scaling Up A Household Brand
Scaling Up A Household Brand
2. Business Strategy Development
3. Customer Strategy
Incorporated in 1969, SAGA offers a broad-spectrum of renowned and reputable locally manufactured food products such as Rice Vermicelli, Flour Vermicelli, Bean Vermicelli, Egg Noodles, and Fish Maws, which are well-favoured by both locals and abroad, too. Not commonly known, SAGA also imports trading food products such as Instant Noodles, Oil, Fragrant Rice and Potato Starch.
Due to the pandemic, the past few years have been challenging for the F&B and food manufacturing industry. As a local household brand for over 50 years, Saga Foodstuffs wanted to explore how they could improve their current business model and develop appropriate strategic plans in order to scale up.
Process Management
To help Saga to kickstart its digital journey, a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) study was conducted for Saga where all the important steps of the work processes to deliver value from start to end of the production were identified and scrutinised. This helped Saga identify the bottlenecks of their processes and the areas for automation and process enhancements.
Besides that, we advised them to develop Standard Work Instructions (SWIs) to improve comprehension & retention of procedural information.
Business Strategy Development
We assisted to build up a proper corporate structure & business model that enables scalability. On top of that, we helped to lay out strategic plans for business transformation.
We also recommended expanding their product portfolio by leveraging on several factors that impact consumers’ food purchasing decisions today in Singapore:
- Elder-friendly & health consciousness – Functional foods for Asia’s ageing population have been identified as a core growth opportunity for firms in Singapore.
- RTE (ready-to-eat) or ‘quick meal’ – Covid-19 has led to a considerably shift in the buying patterns of consumers ranging from basic necessities to high-value items like packed food items, processed food, snacks, etc. There was a significant spike in the demand for packaged food products like biscuits and instant noodles, resulting in an increase in the average purchase value per customer.
Customer Strategy
We discovered that Saga Foodstuffs did not tap on digital platforms and e-commerce channels to reach out to a growing base of online shoppers and customers.
To ride on the digitalisation wave, we proposed to establish a Flagship Store at online marketplaces such as Lazada and/or Shopee. The benefits of selling on these two leading platforms is that Saga can cater to the needs of buyers more effectively (better shipping terms, for example), and the availability of multiple payment options potentially attract more customers.
To help Saga with the selection, a comparison was made between Shopee & Lazada, to which Saga considered these platforms as complementary instead of separate channels.
Saga then leveraged on such platforms by using a small initial investment to test new market and buyer demands before committing more resources. They could benchmark competitors to see where they stand, and make the necessary adjustments and adaptations.
Human Capital Consulting
In view of their ageing workforce, we recommended a Mature Talent Programme to facilitate knowledge transfer from older, more experienced employees to the new batch of younger workers. This will also help ensure higher talent acquisition & retention.
- 10% revenue growth is forecasted from the introduction of the recommended new product lines
- E-commerce sales is projected to bring in 5% additional revenue
- Production lead time is expected to improve by 20%
- Approximately 30% reduction on non-value-added production processes
- Estimated 15% savings in manpower cost, 30% increase in staff retention, 28% decrease in turnover rates and 50% drop in cost-per-hire
“Through Advanced Consultancy’s assistance, I realised the importance of engaging experts to provide a fresh and neutral perspective to facilitate proper strategic planning and business transformation. I believe that other companies, especially family businesses, would be able to benefit from their help as well.”
– Saga Foodstuffs