Trade Promotion Analytics Software for a Food Processing Company with 30,000+ Employees

About Our Client

The Client is a US food processing company with more than 140 years history. The Client owns over 150 number one and number two brands in over 200 major locations worldwide. It operates plants on six continents and employs around 30 000 people.

Challenge

As the Client has a rich brand portfolio of consumer goods, trade promotion management is one of the key areas of concern. In order to collect and analyze data the Client uses special trade promotion management software integrated into ERP-system. The process of building reports from multiple tables is time-consuming for users because of large products portfolio, various retailer types with unique discounts and trading terms. To facilitate an analysis of collected data and to analyze information in-depth the Client needed to implement a solution that would store the data in an aggregated form.

Solution

Based on the Client’s requirements, ScienceSoft's retail app development team created ten multidimensional Cognos cubes for the trade promotion management software that were grouped around specific business functions:

• Four cubes were designed for promotion analysis.
• Four cubes were designed for finance or commercial control.
• Two cubes were designed for demand planning.

Each Cube contains pertinent and useful metrics for the particular area of the business. To find the information sales and financial managers exactly need they should choose an appropriate cube, generate reports and perform the analysis. With the help of Cognos cubes users are able to analyze sales by retailers and goods categories.

Promotion analysis covers a full trade promotion cycle, including:

• Planning of the promotion campaign, sales volume forecasting.
• Results of the campaign, including the amount of shipped goods and promotion costs.
• Sales analysis based on the data from the consumer research company.
• Execution of the commitments to the retailers.

The data sources are systems and applications, such as: Scorecard, Action Calendar, SAP, Manugistics.

Results

ScienceSoft created ten multidimensional Cognos cubes for particular business functions that contain all the trade promotion data in an aggregated form. The Cubes provide sales volume and trade promotion forecasting with accuracy and visibility, thereby helping to improve speed-to-market as well as to achieve high performance for both Client’s brands and retailer partners.

The Cubes were designed to be integrated with the Client’s ERP system that helps the Client’s top-management makes informed decisions.

Technologies and Tools

IBM Cognos, Oracle 11G, Oracle Forms, Web Forms, Excel.