Conair Tames Big Data

As the developer, manufacturer and marketer of health and beauty products and kitchen and electronic appliances, Conair Corporation (www.conair.com) receives a constant stream of downstream data from retail customers and market research partners. To drive sales, the company’s consumer insights and category management team is charged to produce in-depth reports for more than 50 categories based on this data.

Until recently, this was a herculean task. Conair’s analytical team spent too much time harmonizing and transforming an abundance of unstructured and unintegrated data into a useable information source. Conair’s Information Technology (IT) department had done little to help those charged with making sense of the data beyond providing PCs and server space to house multiple spreadsheets and personal databases.

Together, White and Harding wrote a business case that would essentially transform the company’s “big data” problem into actionable insights. The goal was to increase the productivity of the category management team, improve the satisfaction of end recipients of the reports and provide a deeper analysis for all the teams that it services.
 

Under an agreed upon cross-functional partnership, IT would fund and support the vendor selection project, while Category Management was charged to lead the implementation, with support from an IT management team leader.

Together, they looked for a solution that would be flexible and mobile with different security hierarchies that could harmonize, clean and normalize multiple raw data sets. Auto reporting and a dynamic dashboard were also requirements. After evaluating multiple tools, the company selected Orchestro (www.orchestro.com) as its database provider based on its “best-in-class software and robust technical capabilities,” says White.

The official project kicked off in December of 2011. While the category management team worked on coding syndicated, point-of-sale and EDI data with more than 100 attributes, Orchestro initiated database construction to match Conair’s specifications. Along the way, some unique and unforeseen challenges were presented. For example, in 2012, Walmart decided to finally share sales data with suppliers, causing Conair and Orchestro to revamp the database and implement parallel reporting. Then, NPD made changes to its data delivery model in July 2012, calling for another set of tweaks.

Both White and Harding agree that regular communication was key to overcoming challenges and completing the project within specification and on time.

“You need to have a clear vision of what the technology will do to deliver the business value within an agreed timeframe. To kick off the project, we established a detailed project plan with Orchestro. Throughout the project, we followed this plan with timeline adjustments as agreed enhancements were added to the scope in order to increase business value,” says White.

User adoption was achieved with a two-fold approach. “Power Users” in the category management group were trained on pulling and utilizing reports, and continued to attend training sessions when improvements become available. End recipients (the Sales and Marketing teams) were trained to retire previous reports and use pre-built enhanced reports. Conair hosted multiple end receiver workshops so that all teams were fully aware of deliverables and expectations. Monthly data discovery sessions were also held using the dashboard to find insights that would better serve Conair’s retailers.

By September 2012, Conair was ready to evaluate the tool’s ROI. And what it found was a 93 percent improvement in productivity.
 

“Our regular monthly reporting was taking approximately 30 business days to complete,” says White. “Using the tool, we were able to trim our reporting cycle down to two business days.”
 

Now, report recipients (retailers, sales, marketing, senior executives, etc.) receive the data they need in a timely manner before it becomes stale. Analytics teams have more time to data mine, allowing them to focus on and find relevant insights.
 

IT is now sharing this process improvement opportunity with the category management teams in other autonomous divisions of Conair.

“The goal is to agree on a scope, business case and objectives for leveraging the success for Conair Appliances and Cuisinart Divisions elsewhere in our company,” closes Harding.

 

 

 “I am always looking for ways to develop best practices within our vertical to enable the team to spend more time on insights to grow the business.” - Tulie White, Director of Consumer Insights & Category Management, Conair

“I am always looking for opportunities to better partner with other departments to add more business value through better — or even innovative — use of information technology.” Jon Harding, Global CIO, Conair

 

Conair/Cuisinart subscribes to retailer and syndicated data for more than 50 categories. Data is delivered daily, weekly and monthly depending on the source. The result: too much raw data to process and mine before the next data release.

 

A tool developed with Orchestro now does the heavy data administrative lifting enabling Conair/Cuisinart’s analytical teams to zero in on business insights. Today, there is a strong link between data management strategies and improved business performance.