Consistent Category

Forty hours to update 1,500 Excel files every month -- is that how you would want to spend time as director of category management for one of the largest producers and marketers of dry pasta in North America? Jennifer Halliburton of American Italian Pasta Company (AIPC) was brought on here in 2003 to fill this position, and while the results of her efforts may have produced some needed data, she and the company quickly realized that category management was a much more strategic function of the business.

One of the principles American Italian Pasta Company (AIPC) was founded on in 1988 and, according to the company remains a current goal, is "being a customer-driven and quality-minded company based on and committed to its guiding principles of integrity, fairness, performance and consistency." Brand performance and consistency was challenged by technology that could not deliver the right data fast enough to make actionable, and disparate data resulted in differing presentations from the sales force.

"Prior to my arrival, AIPC''s view of category management was strictly a data delivery function," Halliburton says. Initially, management challenged her to help the company realize efficiencies with their current data investment before they would commit additional resources to the function.

She discovered that AIPC needed to provide a platform, framework and delivery vehicle that allowed for more professional and updatable sales presentations -- allowing for quicker, more actionable insights to the sales organization; and create a method for more efficient and effective use of its existing consumer data purchases, while adding critical analytical tools.

The Solution In 2005, AIPC began exploring the benefits of integration software to address the data management and efficiencies issues. AIPC decided on Interactive Edge's XP3 integration software for its benefits of allowing future data source "add-ons" like shipment and financial data, while still providing a flexible, integrated output format in Microsoft Excel.

XP3's PowerPoint delivery vehicle also satisfied need for the sales force to create updatable custom presentation decks. Once AIPC purchased the technology, they began working with Interactive Edge's team of consultants on the best plan for implementation. AIPC wanted to tackle the start-up of the software in phases and decided to first address the ACNielsen data.

By January of 2006, AIPC rolled-out XP3 to its field sales users, allowing the company to integrate their ACNielsen Excel extracts into presentation-ready templates populated with the most up-to-date ACNielsen data. Along with the XP3 software implementation, AIPC also purchased automation technology to alleviate the manual process of refreshing the database with the newest monthly update.

This platform facilitated the creation of cohesive and effective selling presentations through PowerPoint templates, ensuring that the AIPC sales team has all the charts, tables and graphs necessary to help complete the analytical view of consumer's purchasing trends. Sales associates now have the ACNielsen updated information the day after the data refresh is downloaded, instead of waiting more than one week. Now they can spend time understanding the customer's business and how best to partner with the customer to create better consumer demand.

Issues in the start-up phase of the project mostly surrounded the lack of internal personnel both on the category management and IT side. Yet, the root of these issues was exactly why it was so important to get this project completed -- to create efficiencies and more effective delivery for a time-starved organization.

Looking Forward

AIPC management now sees category management's key function as providing a "consumer-driven" view of the business by translating data analytics into actionable consumer insights. AIPC's implementation of XP3 helps to more efficiently manage its category by providing a better understanding of what key performance measures are driving the biggest category changes.  XP3 has given AIPC the ability to arrange its category analytics into more targeted "buckets." For instance, instead of having massive data tables that the sales team would have to sift through to find the biggest business issue, XP3 allows for the creation of "mini-analytics decks" that direct the sales person to the greatest opportunities for an account. This allows the sales team to rapidly understand the issues. In turn they can be conveyed to the customer and solutions can be offered on the spot. 

XP3 helps to make other business strategies more effective. Halliburton says, "Being a manufacturer of both branded and private label pasta, it is critically important for our organization to understand how to grow the entire pasta category with our retailer -- both our branded label volume and our private label volume. Many of our former data reports focused on one main parameter like a single customer or a single brand, with no benchmark comparisons against other parameters competing in the total category." The new format of reports, she explains, forces the sales organization to view the customer from many different perspectives such as trend comparisons, ACV Fair Share Comparisons, pricing comparisons, merchandising support comparisons and so on.

The outcome is a "total category view" of AIPC's customers and competition. Halliburton notes, "As a result, we can make better strategic decisions about managing both our private label volume and branded business, and become better business partners to our customers."

AIPC is already gaining a return on its initial XP3 investment and is now looking to expand its current data sources in the next phase to include internal shipment data from Hyperion, as well as food service data to assist its food service sales force.