Catching up with Larry Kumor, VP of Enterprise Applications at The Scotts Company

This month CGT Executive Editor Kara Romanow catches up with Larry Kumor, vice president, Enterprise Applications, The Scotts Company. Find out why he identifies managing and leveraging an ever-increasing amount of data as a top challenge for consumer goods companies over the next few years. Also, learn his approaches to creating value for retailers and acquisition integration.

 

KUMOR: The biggest challenge I see for consumer goods companies moving forward is effectively managing and leveraging the increasing amount of data that is available. The last five years or so has been focused on point-ofsale (POS) data. Moving forward, companies will look to leverage individual consumer data to strengthen their relationship with the end user of their products. Whether it's information gathered from a consumer call center, order data from an e-commerce Web site, retail store loyalty cards or other avenues, the level of granular data that is available is increasing dramatically. The challenge is not necessarily in obtaining the data, but rather in determining how to use it and therefore how to organize it. The goal would be to drive increased sales through tactics such as targeted marketing campaigns, cross-sell/up-sell programs and innovation in new products based on consumer data. The solutions to support these efforts are evolving and I suspect will continue to evolve as the consumer goods companies refine their strategies in this area.

 

KUMOR: The question may be less of how do we better collaborate and more on how can we continue to provide value to our customers. A key enabler to providing that value is through the sharing of information. More and more companies are being provided POS data from their retail partners. At Scotts, we have created an extremely effective technology platform by which we leverage POS data to support category management activities as well as supply chain planning functions. For our largest customers we leverage store level POS and inventory data to forecast and plan replenishment on a store by store basis. In a number of cases, we are placing orders for our customers and sending them a reverse PO so they can plan for receipt of goods at their stores. By automating this process, our customers are able to spend time in other areas, and for Scotts, it helps to reduce variability and increase our supply chain efficiencies.

 

KUMOR: The biggest challenge I see in integrating acquisitions is not the technology, but rather obtaining clarity on the business model that needs to be supported by the technology. Once you know how the business will be run and which processes or functional areas will be rolled into the existing operations, the actual project work is fairly straightforward. Core to enabling those decisions is having the people who will be running or supporting the business engaged in the project from the beginning. This helps to reduce the risk of problems during the hand-off of the solution from the project team to the operations team. Another challenge that can arise with acquisitions is determining when the technology platform should be implemented. In some cases, it may make sense to fully integrate from a people and process perspective first, and then migrate the technology. Usually you do not have that luxury; therefore it becomes that much more critical that you have a clear understanding of how the business model will function so that you align the technology properly.