Who they are and What they do?
The client is one of the largest manufacturers of food products, like chocolates and its derivatives, in the world with presence in over 170 countries across 5 continents. With over 25 production plants and marquee brands, they have been steadily increasing their market share and global footprint over the last 7 decades.
They have lately ventured into new markets and therefore focusing on increasing production by adding new factories and facilities; while managing the global & local supply chains and sales with standardized technology & tools implemented at a global level.
Industry Challenges and Opportunities
Keeping up with the demand for a diverse range of products, with new flavors and packaging, is quintessential to growth. Investments in R&D and route-to-market strategy for target geographies is the key differentiator. Demand in some regions now is more perennial as opposed to traditional consumption that is more clustered around occasions. This leads to continual demand for product development with ever evolving consumer behaviour. Investments in such expansion across geographies render decision-making in this industry to be one of the most complex challenges. It, therefore, requires the organization to balance global standards and processes with local needs.
Client’s Challenge and Saviant Solution
As they entered India market little over a decade ago, while the demand was on a rise, global giants had already been around creating a stiff competition. If you don’t have the right information at the right time, competing with well-established players is an uphill task. FMCGs have access and ability to acquire, store, and process data. But deducing the linkage to consumer behaviour, sales performance, and using it to effectively manage trade & communications needs expertise in data management and business intelligence.
In order to monitor sales at SKU levels across dealers, they decided to build an automated reporting solution for Sales Analytics. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) load packages ingest data from multiple sources like SAP for primary sales and Distributor Management System for secondary sales. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) enables data transformations and modelling to create a single source of truth. Power BI platform helped in design and development of dashboards with drill downs for various KPIs. The Red and Green (RAG) indicators enabled crucial decisions.
Business critical insights from Sales Analytics dashboards included –
- Primary sales and Secondary sales
- Productivity across sales levels from National to Area Sales Managers to Distributors
- MTD, YTD, Month on Month, Year on Year analysis
- Visibility into stock positions across supply chain along with their freshness
Saviant with its global experience in Data Management and Analytics has been their technology partner through this transformation.
Business Intelligence platform architecture diagram
Benefits
Channelling sales and inventory data from disparate sources into a single source of truth unlocked the true potential of the sales function. Empowering field sales with Power BI based sales analytics dashboards reveal actionable insights - about stock, freshness, geography helped focused tactical actions. The Business Intelligence platform equipped decision makers with stronger belief in data accuracy and intuitive indicators to strategize sales for higher competitiveness & growth.
Sales Analytics is a significant value add to FMCG / Food industry’s growth strategy. Moreover, leveraging business intelligence for production, supply chain, finance and HR can give a valuable boost to a unified approach in intelligent decision making.