When the fruitful effort resulted to increase market share and improve operational procedure, the Company was able to slowly recover lost resources and market share was gradually growing. This gave chance for the Company to return back to its employees the hard work earned. The first bonus was given after three years of hard work and loyalty. Also, a scheme of add-on commission was given to Sales Personnel who meet or exceeds target volume sales.
Coupled with hard work and faith to success, the market share of Cosmo Soda continually increased during the next years. On the third year, the Company was able to put up one provincial plant for better distributions. The next years, an additional two were also constructed.
In addition to the geographical growth, the Company had decided to expand on production growth, as well, in terms of beverages offered. Considering a number of consumers were leaning towards healthier life, the Company formulated non-carbonated drinks such as juices, ice tea and energy drinks.
Aside from geographical and product growth, we entered into what we call "non-conventional sales routing system." Non-conventional sales routing was a system where not only employed sales personnel would be accessing, entering, selling and distributing products to the market but distributors or what we call third-party sales distributor (TPSD) would be allowed to pick up stocks daily from plant and offer them to stores and restaurants of their assigned locations. At the end of the routing day, these TPSD would remit total sales cash collected from Customers directly to Account Development Sales Representative, who will in turn turnover such to Finance in-charged of sales collections.
Another challenge arose when Internal Audit Team discovered fraud and connivance among Sales Manager and Finance Manager on one of the three plants. This fraudulent act was discovered upon confirmation of one of the audit teams to customers. Evidently, fraud was committed on sales collections of receivables....
Payments of collections were not remitted but in-fact went to their pockets. Since distribution of products and collections were allowed to be done by Sales Personnel, they can easily declare it hadn't been paid yet. As a result thousands of dollars were actually loss by the Company monthly.
To further strengthen control, part of the procedures to be exercised by finance would be direct confirmation of balance to customers, a separate team would be in-charged on the sales collections and rotation of work would be implemented on all departments.
In the six years of running this business, the Company, composed of us executives and employees, committed erroneous moves and mistakes. It had been very difficult to rise above those with established products that we had to work doubly hard. Company policies were created to ensure there risks are properly managed, if not controlled; marketing schemes were formed to strategize on how we would tackle and challenge competitors; an in-house computerized system was developed to better facilitate the generation of timely and more accurate reports; segregation of duties were exercised to address safeguarding of assets; and methods of motivation were created through salary increases, bonuses and incentives. However, despite all the necessary safety measures made by the Company, I learned that there is no amount of rules, controls and other precautionary methods could prevent employees in conniving and plotting for personal benefits. All I can do was continued effort to keep the employees happy and rewarded, ensure policies were followed and rotations of employees were done to ascertain non-familiarization of process enough for them to be tempted to commit such fraudulent acts. Organization and running a business is a very challenging task that at the end of the day, what rewarded us the most was the thought that this Company was able to help hundreds of employees and was able to contribute to the consumers with a quality product that would make them come back for more.
