Client Background

• Client: A British Personal Care Company
• Industry: Consumer Packaged Goods  
• Area of operations: Personal Care products – EU, ANZ, Africa, Commonwealth
• No. of Employees: 3500+
• No. of Customers: Each geo has thousands of customers as large retail chain, small chain and independents
• Any other relevant details such as annual revenue:  GBP 500 Mn +

Challenge 

In the fast-moving consumer goods industry, trade promotions account for nearly 20% of total revenues (second only to cost of goods sold). Optimizing that spend is essential to growth and profitability. A major international personal-care business with more than 5,000 employees had been using an in-house application for trade promotion management (TPM). To handle the kind and volume of trade promotions it anticipated in the future, the company sought a new trade promotion optimization (TPx) solution that offered greater functionality and integrated with its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, enabling it to meet the short timeframes required by its global ERP milestones.

Solution

As a global enterprise, the personal care leader needed a seamless global solution with localization for its key markets in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Wipro’s Promax Advanced Trade Promotion Management solution offered the TPx functionality and features the company needed – particularly the SAP integration – while delivery through Microsoft’s Azure cloud addressed the localization. Moreover, the Promax solution features a future-ready product architecture that enables improved business user experiences.

Wipro’s focus on flexible implementation and deploying integrated systems mapped to the personal care company’s ERP rollout plans across multiple regions. The approach also provided strong project governance and tracked and managed every deliverable.

The solution addresses every requirement for effective TPx management and optimization, starting with the annual planning, budgeting, and promotions management processes including workflow approval and settlement. It provides full integration with SAP ERP. Finally, it enables a seamless data flow across the company’s entire IT landscape, delivering comprehensive reporting capabilities through the Promax Data Warehouse.

Working collaboratively with all the client’s relevant teams to ensure the solution would meet broad marketing and trade promotion goals, we implemented the Promax Advanced Trade Promotion Management solution in eight months for the United Kingdom and Australia/New Zealand regions.

Business Impact

With the Promax solution in place and running, every team involved with trade promotion – Sales, Finance, and Demand – began to realize several substantial benefits. First, an integrated environment enables them to collaborate easily and effectively on trade promotion activities throughout the entire promotion life cycle. A uniform set of analytics provides accurate ROI analysis and reporting dashboards for real-time performance monitoring. And the automated and real-time SAP ERP and advanced planning and optimization (APO) integration enables the company to focus on a “one number” approach to trade promotions across functions including Sales, Finance and Operations.

In addition to a generally better user experience, the Promax solution is leading to substantial KPI improvements. Decisions are made faster thanks to real-time data analysis. Productivity is higher for all users. And, ultimately, the company is generating incremental revenue from the project.  

Client sales teams now plan promotions up to 10x faster. Plus, the ability to track the live status of promotions through seamless integration of scan and retailer POS data has improved system forecasts, on both volumes and key KPIs, by more than 50%. Finally, the usage of the right insights has improved both the bottom and top line of trade promotional spends and overall revenues by up to 3% across brands and geos.

Plans for the future include a planned upgrade to the even more user friendly “Version 11” of Promax Advanced and extending the capabilities to include predictive statistical modelling of baselines and promotional forecasts, deep dive advanced analytics to generate “actionable insights,” and strategy planning sandbox environments.