Sara Lee's Best Practice Tips for Total Trade Management
March 20, 2009 -- In 2006, Sara Lee Corporation embarked on a journey to create a comprehensive trade management strategy for its North American Retail business. But first, Bryan Rulli, director, Business Information for Sara Lee, and his colleagues were challenged to implement sound trade promotion management processes and tools.
"We now have the launch pad to continue the journey to standardize, consolidate and optimize our information systems and processes further," says Rulli.
With a strong, robust TPM foundation now in place using Siebel Trade Promotion Management, now a component of Oracle Comprehensive Trade Management, Sara Lee is preparing to phase in a trade promotion optimization tool as well as construct of a demand signal repository.
Here, Rulli shares best practice tips for adopting a total trade management strategy within your organization.
Tip No. 1: Align the organization on common key performance indicators. Ensure that you are planning for the right goals that will deliver bottom line results and help the company reach its objectives. From past experience, we knew that when organizations are not aligned, inefficiencies and waste proliferate.
Tip No. 2: Don't lose sight of the importance of master data, which needs to be an on-going focus of the organization with a well-established, executive-backed governance committee in place for process discipline and standards development. At Sara Lee, my team has responsibility for data quality for retail. We partner with the master data team to ensure data is structured, standardized and optimized for business consumption. Only once you have your master data house in order can you expand your reach to include data from external sources, like point-of-sale data.
Tip No. 3: Focus on developing a solid trade promotion management process and system before moving into more advanced capabilities. It is understandable that most people focus on the tip of the iceberg when developing business solutions. It is important to have a solid, sustainable foundation in place that is aligned with your company's strategy and objectives before extending it further into the organization. For example, it would have been very difficult to integrate a trade promotion optimization solution in our previous system due to the complexity, constraints and narrow design. The previous system was a tactical tool that could not have been easily scaled to support integration of strategy and deep analytics.
Tip No. 4: Develop a strong partnership between IT and the business. Aligning both organizations with the problems and the opportunities will pay huge dividends as the information management requirements of the enterprise ramp up in scale and complexity.
Click here to read more about Sara Lee's comprehensive trade management strategy in the CGT May 2009 cover story "Total Trade Management."
"We now have the launch pad to continue the journey to standardize, consolidate and optimize our information systems and processes further," says Rulli.
With a strong, robust TPM foundation now in place using Siebel Trade Promotion Management, now a component of Oracle Comprehensive Trade Management, Sara Lee is preparing to phase in a trade promotion optimization tool as well as construct of a demand signal repository.
Here, Rulli shares best practice tips for adopting a total trade management strategy within your organization.
Tip No. 1: Align the organization on common key performance indicators. Ensure that you are planning for the right goals that will deliver bottom line results and help the company reach its objectives. From past experience, we knew that when organizations are not aligned, inefficiencies and waste proliferate.
Tip No. 2: Don't lose sight of the importance of master data, which needs to be an on-going focus of the organization with a well-established, executive-backed governance committee in place for process discipline and standards development. At Sara Lee, my team has responsibility for data quality for retail. We partner with the master data team to ensure data is structured, standardized and optimized for business consumption. Only once you have your master data house in order can you expand your reach to include data from external sources, like point-of-sale data.
Tip No. 3: Focus on developing a solid trade promotion management process and system before moving into more advanced capabilities. It is understandable that most people focus on the tip of the iceberg when developing business solutions. It is important to have a solid, sustainable foundation in place that is aligned with your company's strategy and objectives before extending it further into the organization. For example, it would have been very difficult to integrate a trade promotion optimization solution in our previous system due to the complexity, constraints and narrow design. The previous system was a tactical tool that could not have been easily scaled to support integration of strategy and deep analytics.
Tip No. 4: Develop a strong partnership between IT and the business. Aligning both organizations with the problems and the opportunities will pay huge dividends as the information management requirements of the enterprise ramp up in scale and complexity.
Click here to read more about Sara Lee's comprehensive trade management strategy in the CGT May 2009 cover story "Total Trade Management."