CGT Announces 2015 Business & Technology Award Winners
Nominations in three award categories were collected from the CGT community throughout 2015. These nominations were then narrowed down to a group of five finalists by CGT's editorial staff based on multiple award criteria, like project scope, goals and results realized thus far. This shorter list was then sent to CGT's editorial and research advisory board members, which elected one “winner” in each category.
The following are the Business & Technology Award winners for 2015:
CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AWARD: Frito-Lay North America (PepsiCo)
The Customer Management Award is presented to the consumer goods firm that is best leveraging technology or business process change to manage customer relationships, trade promotions, marketing and/or consumer insights.
PepsiCo's Frito-Lay brand deployed an advanced analytic trade optimization solution to reduce unprofitable trade promotion spend by up to 50 percent in major accounts. This allowed for an increase in employee productivity and increase revenue and profits for the Frito-Lay North America division – a $14 billion organization.
Frito-Lay is now able to analyze the incremental lift on promotion spend by price points being set, merchandizing activity selected and the timing of the promotion being run, while looking at the effect of all of this against the entire category portfolio. As a result, Frito-Lay is leveraging the advanced predictive capabilities provided by Demantra’s Predictive Trade solution to create promotion calendars that factor the impacts across its portfolio of products, as well as industry leading capabilities to factor impacts across competitive products.
The company is now leveraging these insights to plan more effective offers to consumers, which in turn drives higher volume and profit picture to the retailer and Frito-Lay. In turn, this forecast has been used to drive the demand within the supply chain providing alignment of integrated business planning yielding to higher accuracy of the product to demand.
**Finalists in this category are Kellogg Company, Keurig Green Mountain, WhiteWave Foods and Wyeth Nutrition (Nestl).
SMB MARKET AWARD: Lactalis American Group, Inc.
The SMB Market Award is presented to the small to mid-sized consumer goods firm that is best utilizing technology or business initiatives to achieve substantial growth in size and/or revenue.
Lactalis' overarching goal is to encourage trial and drive sales via couponing opportunities, and serving ads to consumers who are browsing within a digital grocery environment. The company increases its market share by tailoring its messaging directly to brand loyalists as well as competitive brand purchasers. This strategy allows Lactalis' brand Galbani cheese to position itself as a must-buy for summer entertainment while increasing brand awareness, driving add-to lists, and add-to-cart conversions.
Lactalis implements this strategy by leveraging custom MyWebGrocer online and offline data methodology to measure sales, share lift and purchase intent. The Ad2Gro solution allows Galbani cheese to gain access to a highly contextual environment where they reach and impact millions of consumers who are planning their in-store purchases as well as buying groceries online for pick-up or delivery. The company not only provides unparalleled marketing and customer service, but an excellent product in Galbani cheese, and a prized customer experience.
**Finalists in this category are Caf Britt, King’s Hawaiian, Naples Soap Company and Samuel Adams.
DICK CLARK SUPPLY CHAIN AWARD: Mondelez International
In honor of the late supply chain visionary Dick Clark, this award is presented to a consumer goods firm for excellence in executing improvements in supply or demand planning, warehouse management, transportation management, S&OP processes or supply chain network design.
The Mondelez International Customer Service & Logistics (CS&L) team is on a mission to continually improve the on-shelf availability of their snack items. A Mondelez International snack customer, who is delivered via a 3rd party distributor, faced an all-time low store on shelf availability. The Mondelez International CS&L team worked with the customer and distributor to address the situation. Using a Lean Six Sigma approach and store-level POS data, the team developed an improved end-to-end forecasting and store replenishment process. The improved process was introduced on a segment of items and had immediate results, especially around promoted items.
As a result, the on-shelf availability improved and stabilized, sales grew, future forecasts were enhanced and the collaborative team partnership flourished. After four months the measured on-shelf availability improved by 4 percent.
Mondelez International is now focused on applying this process to additional product categories and implementing with other customers. The success of this process implementation was due to the Lean Six Sigma process, the richness of POS data and great customer collaboration.
**Finalists in this category are Electrolux, Hallmark, NIKE and Red Bull North America.
Congratulations to all of the 2015 finalists and winners. For in-depth coverage on each of these stories, read CGT’s upcoming December issue.