Holistic Enterprise Planning for CPG Companies

• Marketing Analytics

Traditional business plans and initiatives for revenue management have always centered around finances. Established and new enterprises focus almost exclusively on concerns such as overhead costs, pricing structures to be adopted, trade spending, and the estimated return on investment. These are important decisions but are often looked at or solved in isolation.

Given the fast pace change in the consumer landscape and environment in general, Org needs to continuously gather signals and insight across these individual elements & try to bring in the interconnected and functioning in symbiosis, to enable business to truly flourish and decision-making in a more holistic view.

Before you dive into the finer details of each business function, take a step back to look at the big picture. Understand your organizational objectives, be clear about what you want your business to look like, and conduct a holistic planning exercise that accounts for the enterprise as a whole, and not individual business functions or aspects within them.

Enterprise Planning for Revenue Growth Management

Today, manufacturers are conducting holistic enterprise planning to support their revenue growth management (RGM) initiatives. CPG companies are gradually embracing these capabilities so that they can solve some underlying challenges that have been plaguing the CPG industry. Enterprises are looking to integrate AI-powered tools to automate processes, analytics, and 360^o insights generation; to reduce manual effort, eliminate errors, and enhance operational efficiency across business functions.

Adopting these AI-based platforms that facilitate holistic enterprise planning is fundamental to not just process improvement, but to having a unified data-backed truth that guides business decisions across functions; and provides visibility into the enterprise as a whole. With access to automated capabilities, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment and insights into business process efficiency in real-time. This in turn contributes to increased agility and the optimization of promotion and pricing initiatives.

Manufacturers who haven’t yet deployed an RGM solution, are attempting to adopt a holistic enterprise planning initiative to improve their operational efficiency and process efficacy. Solutions providers and vendors are also supporting their initiative with innovative AI-powered tools. But before seamlessly integrating an RGM solution into the enterprise, there are certain pain points that manufacturers need to address and opportunities they need to capitalize on.

Roadblocks to Holistic Enterprise Planning

• There is no single owner of data within the organization, and the available data is not pruned, organized, and centralized.
• Organizations do not trust their analytics tools and capabilities.
• Organizations have to understand the objective behind questions and be agile and accurate when answering business problems.
• Analytics needs to be integrated, visibility has to be 360^o, and reporting needs to be streamlined for all business spends; from marketing and trade promotions to eCommerce and D2C.
• Not having a ‘single truth’ to drive business decisions, is a hindrance to cross-functional collaboration and effective decision-making. This is further affected by siloed information.
• Operating with legacy systems for Trade Promotion Management and Optimization, require extensive analytics and is time-consuming. They are a burden for analysts and decision-makers, offering inefficient reporting and lacking the capability to suggest the next-best steps.

For CPG manufacturers attempting to digitally transform their organization with holistic enterprise planning, and employ AI-powered RGM solutions to de-silo their data, there needs to be a robust strategy in place. A consumer-focused strategy that streamlines insights and helps to deliver hyper-personalization, and ensure increased on-shelf availability, value additions, and meaningful engagements. For true CPG success, there needs to be visible across the entire value chain of the enterprise, coupled with the drive to overcome the above-mentioned challenges and employ strategic plans that enable each business function to optimize operations and enhance efficiency.

Holistic Enterprise Planning: From Trade Promotion Management to Revenue Growth Optimization

The execution of holistic enterprise planning (EPx), is a streamlined process of interlinked capabilities, contributing to organizational objectives as opposed to the objectives of individual business units.

The journey can be viewed across the following steps:

EPx Platforms, Automation, and the Future of RGM

Analytics vendors over the past few years have been developing AI-powered platforms for holistic trade promotion planning and execution. The platforms integrate seamlessly into the CPG manufacturer’s operations and enhance trade efficacy and efficiency with capabilities that include managing trade promotions and analyzing ‘What-if’ scenarios, all the way to prescribing pre-and post-ROI actions.

With automation taking care of the workload and providing actionable insights for RGM in near real-time; CPG businesses have been increasingly adopting these platforms to combat inefficiencies, identify business opportunities, and maximize pricing and promotion effectiveness.

Analytics partners such as Course5, are enabling enterprises to harness the capabilities of both Trade Promotion execution within Revenue Growth Management, through a single streamlined platform. This union of capabilities forms the holistic enterprise planning ecosystem. Effective enterprise planning and execution has the power to transform the organization’s value chain from end to end.

Get in touch with us at Course5 Intelligence, and let’s figure out how we can do the same for you.