Collaborative Analytics

Collaborative Analytics has taken out the silos from the business analysis process and data from disparate sources like customer, transactional, operational are analyzed to come up with a single, unified version of the truth. The new mantra of involving the stake holders, both internal and external to an organization, in a collaborative manner for product ideation and definition is leading to  faster and more acceptable product deployment in the market and therefore more profitable business results. The fresher perspectives that multiple frames of references brings about combined with the tacit knowledge has led to deeper insights and more robust analytic skills.
Sharing forms the cornerstone of Collaborative Analytics and Wikis, Google Docs are all based on this idea. Technologies and tools are as intelligent as the people who are using it to collaborate. A culture of sharing and collaborating must be there for any collaborative analytics initiatives to succeed.

The business analytics that results out of such collaborations should be able to ensure better performance, and should be scalable and flexible enough to meet the needs of all users. Working towards a common goal, sharing the risks and rewards and providing the intended results at the minimum utilization of resources are what constitute a true Collaborative enterprise. The boundaries of how various teams synergize together has added new dimensions to traditional Marketing. The marketers 360 degree view of the consumer today is enhanced by this social convergence of analytics which includes internal data along with blogs, reviews, sentiments, opinions etc.. Collaborative Analytics, to put it briefly, is the socialism-centric way of doing things which focuses more on the power of the collective wisdom than the intelligence of the chosen few.

Posted by Navin Dhananjaya at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As the consumer is becoming more and more engaged in the digital world, the industry is finally getting serious about digital media. Leading companies have cut measured U.S. media spending overall last quarter, while spending on internet display ads has more than doubled, according to data from TNS. It is a great way to connect with consumers and really have much deeper ongoing relationships with them.  Ability to see a measurable impact on sales has allowed them to justify even more spending on digital down the road. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, estimated that CPG digital spending shot up more than 60% last year to $1.5 billion, increasing its still-modest share of all digital media spending by two percentage points in a year to 6%. Interestingly its impact on spend on other marketing mix components is varied. Spend on trade promotion continue upward spiral in spite of increasing cost and complexity while network-TV spending has declined. With the advent of better data and ability to view measurable impact will ultimately will be what it takes to get consumer package-goods brands to spend more on digital. It would be interesting to see how digital revolution will change the marketing game especially the trade promotion area and how CPG companies and retailers will utilize the digital channel to extend the reach and effectiveness of trade promotions.

Posted by Jayalakshmi Subramanian at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Trade promotions are an important business practice adopted by Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies to increase market share, shelf space, revenues and margins. The SAP Trade Promotion Management (SAP TPM) is a well rounded solution that address all the major processes spanning sales & promotion planning, field planning, customer sell-in & negotiation, retail execution & validation and both pre-event & post-event analysis. Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) solutions complement Trade Promotion Management solutions by providing capabilities surrounding predictive analysis and what-if scenarios using context specific analytical models. These capabilities can be leveraged by the business user at the time of planning to predict the outcomes on different sets of promotion/price parameters. They could then adopt the best outcome as their plan. This will lead to more balanced plans rather than merely copying previous plans.

One evident business problem that comes up in the usage of a TPO solution with SAP TPM is the lack of out-of-the-box integration. The business user would need to manually feed in the various promotions that are the optimized outcome of the TPO solution. Moreover, the price optimization results, as part of the turn business planning, would also need to be manually applied to the backend ERP system.

Wouldn’t it be great if TPO solutions had readymade integration capabilities that could actually turn the optimized results in TPO solutions into actions in the SAP TPM and SAP ERP systems? This would mean that the optimized prices & promotions adopted (after comparing the results of various what-if scenarios using predictive analytics) in the TPO system are automatically transferred and converted to execution level objects in the SAP ERP and SAP TPM systems. I believe that TPO and TPM systems could then be said to be truly integrated at the process level.

Posted by Shaji Oonnoonny Thomas at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The CGT summer conference reverberated with two main themes- How to leverage the digital revolution for better sales/ marketing and around the evergreen topic of trade spend. As the companies are still struggling to better manage and optimize the trade spend- the second biggest line item in the balance sheet, discussions and presentations centered around various ways in which trade spend should be treated as an investment, instead of expense. Industry veterans and experts expressed their views on how it should integrate with internal planning and methods of goal setting that could be tangibly measured and monitored effectively. If there was one theme running throughout the session it was, ‘Insights to action.’ The closed-loop trade promotion optimization integrated with trade systems continues to be the focus area owing to its visibility in sales and marketing and its high impact on the results – the key being better promotional ROI. As trade promotion tactics become digital and lead to increased visibility, accountability and compliance- it will enable trade promotions to be rationalized and the money invested in them made as productive as any other prudent investment.

With trade spend spiraling upwards in spite of economic downturn and declining IT budgets, the focus is on optimization solutions that complement existing applications and  are deployed with lower upfront cost.

While trade promotion optimization is problem area that CPG companies have been attempting to get their hands around for more than a decade , completeness of the above  vision is what will define the success in the era of Trade Promotions 2.0.

Posted by Navin Dhananjaya at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)