Solo Cup Attains Trade Promotion Data Integrity

Faced with constant change and increasing global competition, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers must strive to meet the high demands of launching potentially profitable products while simultaneously improving distribution and operational efficiencies associated with trade promotion management (TPM). While many organizations have tried to improve trade promotion effectiveness through various means, few have been successful. The reasons vary, but the culprit in most cases is poor data integrity and lack of sufficient validation.

 

Although many CPG companies have increased their technology investment in support of TPM over the years, few firms have created a holistic view of the critical data that is necessary to support their promotion planning, forecasting and integrated analytics requirements. As a result, enterprise trade-related business processes can be compromised due to incomplete, inaccurate, outdated or duplicated data. Equally challenging is the ability to attain a high level of ongoing validation that is often dependent on intelligence extracted from several data sources or systems within an organization. 

As the CPG market continues to trend toward increased regulation, manufacturers need to implement technologies that establish a solid foundation of trade-related data which ultimately helps to maintain regulatory compliance, lower operational risk and ensure successful performance.

 

In the face of such data dispersion, duplication and conflict, CPG companies are compelled to restore a level of trust in their enterprise data. As a result, building and maintaining a reliable data infrastructure for trade management is now a prerequisite for success. Organizations, like Solo Cup Company, are setting the standard for data integrity. 

 

Solo Cup Company, a $1.5 billion manufacturer of single use products used to serve food and beverages for the consumer/retail, foodservice and international markets, recognized the inherent benefits of accurate data for its Retail Division that includes both private label and branded products. 

“Trade Funds have one of the largest impacts on our top and bottom-line sales performance,” says Kimberly Healy, vice president of the Consumer Division, at Solo Cup Company. “We wanted to enable everyone involved in the process -- members of the sales, broker, retail manager, inside sales and deduction teams -- to optimize all trade-related data and improve business operations.”

Solo set out to find a TPM application that would optimize key functions in the trade promotion process, including liability and profitability reporting, controls, data validation for auditing, and compliance. After an intensive product review process, Solo selected MEI’s Trade Promotion Management solution.

 “We needed a system that was easy and straight forward to use. Time is so important in our business and we wanted an application that would enable anyone from trade management, accounting, sales, etc. to use it quickly. Our trade fund managers need to be able to build a promotion fast and get that information to other divisions such as finance or sales,” comments Jackie Reed, consumer trade funds manager, Solo Cup Company. “Compliance is also very important to us, so the solution had to be web-based and enable us to put systems, interfaces and internal controls in place to become SOX and SAS 70 compliant.”

 

“While promotion and planning are critical steps in the process, we place a significant amount of emphasis on subsequent promotion management and execution,” says Reed. “It was imperative that the solution enable us to quickly and easily load budgets and sales plans into the application and then measure against that plan to determine where we may have over- or under-spent, and why.”

 

Solo’s team went live with the MEI application in October of 2008, allowing brokers to enter promotions in time for 2009 planning. “We added deductions in February 2009 and by year’s end we had tightened our controls, become SOX compliant and had one year of validation under our belt,” Reed adds.

 

Now vendor data and payments from Solo’s Oracle system; market, product, deduction, pricing and sales data from Solo’s SAP order management database; and COGS data feed the new TPM system. As a result, Solo now has controls in place to validate the data exchange between these source systems, improving business processes throughout the trade management cycle. For example, the new TPM solution helps deliver reliable control reports which ensure the interfaces and the data between these systems are in sync. 

 

“The benefits really are found in the details. For example, now, I can identify if and when a particular promotion was entered and by whom, the approval time, whether it started on schedule and how many -- payments actually cleared,” says Reed. “This is the management and execution aspect that we really wanted to focus on and felt had the most value. The data enables us to create accurate liability reports, which are well received by Finance, helping to us identify liabilities and ensure we remain compliant. Additionally, we have been able to use other key data elements more creatively by developing better metrics and broker scorecards.”

 

According to Debbie Bagby, IT business partner at Solo, “It’s not only accurate data that powers Solo’s trade systems, it’s who can see that data and then use the analytics for reporting or for better decision making. As a result, the IT team is able to provide the most optimal reports to the brokers, broker managers, sales managers, directors, deduction managers and finance department. They all have the ability to drill down and review specific data elements around validations.”

 

In an industry that faces increasing pressure to drive sales, enhance customer service levels and ensure regulatory compliance, turning raw data into insightful and actionable information can reap huge rewards. For Solo, more meaningful customer relationships are the end result of an improved ability to execute and manage trade promotions.

 

Bagby concludes, “In order to really maximize trade spend and optimize the overall process, it’s essential to have the most accurate and timely data as well as the ability to see clearly into other business systems and coordinate the data between them. By leveraging the MEI solution, we can effectively recognize, relate and then reconcile all of our trade-related data across our internal systems in order to improve sales planning and demand forecasting.”