Decision-Driving Sales & Marketing Analysis

Client:
Manufacturer that distributes its products through resellers and other third-party channels

Business Challenge:
To create a single view of sales and marketing activity that drives decision-making

Technology Challenge:
To leverage a variety of technologies, including:
• J.D. Edwards ERP system
• Proprietary stovepipe applications
• Microsoft IIS and SQL Server

Solution:
Creative Data’s solution combines sales goals collected from a web interface with sales and order information from the ERP system.

The data warehouse enables the marketing team to:
• Define sales goals using manageable targets such as ‘per product,’
• ‘per account,’ ‘per brand,’ etc.
• View sales across a varied customer base

It also enables the sales organization to:
• Track progress towards sales targets
• Change compensation structures on the fly
• Drill down to line-item granularity on reports

Benefits:
• Sales and marketing now plan their products and campaigns
• based on comprehensive and up-to-date information
• about what is actually selling.
• Customers can now decide what to stock and sell using sales statistics
• pooled from the broad sample of all sales across vendors.
• The company has defined standard stocking sets for each kind of vendor
• they supply, significantly lowering the cost of inventory tracking.
• Sales and marketing share a common set of terms and views of sales, thus
• promoting cost-saving collaboration.
• In the first few days after the system went live, the company discovered and
• was able to respond to a major, unanticipated rise in market demand.

EXTENDED BENEFITS
The sales and marketing analysis solution now feeds an application that makes it easier for marketing to manage product introduction and closeout processes based on current information about sales trends. The company used the data to determine which of its original 12,000+ active products were most profitable. Then, the marketing team used the solution’s new product retirement and introduction tools to make market-savvy changes to the merchandise. As a result, the company has been able to phase out about 3,000 superfluous products and satisfy market demand with the introduction of several hundred new products -- every year.

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