People, Product and Process: Matrix’s Unique Position in Business Services

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In 2003, a group of Chartered Accountants came together with a singular vision: to become the most respected Business Assurance firm in India. Matrix’s primary focus remains Business Assurance that intersects several traditional non-financial areas across organisations like sales, supply chain, distribution, and compliance. Matrix was listed by NASSCOM as one of the ‘Emerge 50’ companies.

Matrix’s Assurance Services are categorised around the 3 P’s: People, Product and Process. With its country-wide presence and a combination of experience, deep domain expertise and technology partnerships, Matrix offers specific services customised to industry need, across the FMCG, Retail, IT, BFSI, Consumer Durables and other industries.

Across all its offerings Matrix’s services are increasingly digitised. In the front-end – field-based work, Matrix has developed customised apps to ensure rapid data capture and summarisation of data collated, thereby ensuring a faster turnaround time and productivity and ensuring a digital audit trail. At the back-end, Matrix aggressively uses process reengineering frameworks and uses technology to give its customers an efficient and productive service with high visibility into operational metrics and parameters.

People Services - Employee Background Verification Services

Matrix is a market leader in providing assurance services to employers verifying the authenticity of their recruits by offering services like residence checks, education and documentation verifications, character reference verifications, and ID proofs, among others. Matrix is a strong partner to HR functions to enable them to provide quick ‘ready to onboard’ candidates for their businesses. The whole service offering is built on an in-house technology platform - ‘MatEx’, which enables and ensures end-to-end monitoring of the entire process in a digitised way. Matrix’s clientele spans almost all major IT/ITES companies in India. A digital approach capitalising on this platform ensures streamlined and efficient operations, high visibility and rapid turnaround enabling best-in-class service to clients.

Product & Process Services

Trade Promotion Management Services

Consumer goods companies offer a variety of incentives to their partners–like wholesalers, distributors, and modern retail trade–that are based on factors like quantity sold, brands and SKUs sold, and so on. This requires end-to-end management, from verifying at the front-end based on the trade schemes to validating payments in the back-end. Matrix partners with customers both on the front end, and in running the back office to make it an end-to-end service. Matrix believes that its deep domain expertise in this space can add considerable value to any consumer company to manage its Trade Promotion seamlessly and enhance compliance and distributor/customer experience.

Earlier in 2022, Matrix was also awarded ‘Partner of the year’ by a Fortune 25 company in this domain.

Supply Chain Audits

Supply chains in retail, B2B and B2C industries span across multiple storage points, and their audits include checks on warehouses, distributors, wholesalers, and final retail outlets. The specific types of checks include Inventory Audits, Process Audits around adherence to SOPs for Supply Chain Partners, Quality Control and Safety Audits, among others. Matrix has helped several clients identify shrinkages in various contexts and helped several client loss prevention teams take suitable actions.

Fixed Asset Verification

Matrix helps clients complete their fixed asset verification process efficiently by conducting verifications in offices, wholesale, or retail points, or even warehouses and factories. Matrix’s expertise and country-wide network have helped several consumer companies monetise their fixed asset investments by monitoring their usage to ensure full and proper use, which in turn ensures quality products reach their customers while lowering inventory losses, wastage etc.

Credit Collateral Audits

Several Banks and NBFCs employ Matrix to audit inventories which have been pledged as collaterals by their customers, most significantly in vehicle financing. This service requires a strong field presence, a deep understanding of industry norms, and strong ethics and confidentiality for banks to trust a third party all of which are core strengths of Matrix.

Franchise Management Support

Matrix helps its retail customers set up strong retail practices and grow their businesses through franchises. Customers who operate through franchise models often need to monitor adherence to SOPs in a variety of ways, like shop layouts, branding, facades, safety norms, locations, inventory management, and so on. This requires a large field presence and an understanding of the industry in which the franchisees operate. In addition, Matrix also consults with clients to develop and upgrade SOPs and also conducts due diligence before franchisees are appointed.

Customer Experience Support Services

Matrix strong field presence enables the company to conduct Mystery Audits for its customers to ensure that their distribution and retail partners provide the required quality of service as prescribed by the SOPs. They also help benchmark retailing services with competitors and ensure their clients are provided insights to provide best-in-class customer experience and enhance their competitive edge.

E-commerce Support Services

Sales through digital channels like Amazon, Flipkart, and Ajio, have required very tight data reconciliation to ensure returns are accounted for appropriately and cash is collected seamlessly. Matrix has enabled several of its retail clients to reconcile sales and returns, reduce losses and efficiently account for inventory.

Back Office/Transaction Management Services – Master Data Management, Billing, Collection Support

Matrix also provides back-office support to manage their payments and travel claims, and helps in billing and collections – from invoicing, calling customers, and cash applications. This service is rapidly being digitised and automated to ensure low-cost and efficient operation.

Over the last two decades, Matrix has gained the trust of its customers in the Business Assurance space and this theme extends from its expertise in a wide array of on-field and digitised services, with a strong emphasis on ethics and quality of service.

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