Challenge
- A global beverage company needed a solution to address Volume, Distribution and Gross Margin Planning to drive sales improvements. The goal of this initiative was to greatly improve collaboration on sales plans and provide improved insight, buy-in, accountability and responsiveness while eliminating time spent on manual processes and troubleshooting spreadsheets.
- The company then choose to leverage and extend the success of their planning solution by consolidating their spreadsheet based ad planning process into on application. The goal was to greatly improve collaboration on local and regional advertising, to optimize ad spending, by providing improved insight, buy-in and accountability.
Solution
- Replaced over 30 siloed spreadsheets with cloud based connected planning technology, providing more reliable and scalable applications.
- Optimized the business process and dramatically reduced time required to support the annual Volume, Distribution and Gross Margin planning process by streamlining data flow and access to information.
- Developed executive dashboard to quickly give visibility to strengths and potential challenges.
Outcome
- Provided ‘speed of thought’ insight and analysis through ability to automatically cascade the plan to lower level of detail than previously available.
- Able to identify opportunities to increase volume through quick access to insights on like-market performance.
- Greatly improved collaboration between corporate and the field sales organization, improving buy-in to plans and execution.