Do you pay your people to crunch data, or make decisions?

Many CPG businesses feel that they are drowning in data because they don’t have information in the right format and tools to make it easy to use.

I believe that good businesses want their people to make complex decisions with confidence. If you work in sales, supply-chain or data teams within a CPG, how much of your job involves downloading, manipulating and formatting data? How good are you at ‘vlookups’ or pivot tables? Is this where you add the most value to your business?

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“There’s a big difference between the information you need being available and having the resource required to gather it. Extracting data from a retailer portal, formatting it, gleaning insight from it – that’s a huge task when you extrapolate it across every customer.”

Scott Morton, Head of Customer Collaboration at Alpro

The old data way

I started my career as a data analyst, where I spent many years wrangling data in Excel, Access & SQL to get the insight/recommendations that my clients needed. Although, I’m pretty sure no client ever valued the work that was done in order to achieve the insight I provided. While obtaining and manipulating the data is just the first step, it used to take around 90% of my time and effort to put me in a position where I could start applying my domain expertise. Does this resonate with you – do you find yourself in the same position?

The new data way

SKUtrak’s ethos has always been to help humanise data so that people can make complex decisions with confidence. This principle drew me to the organisation in the first place, as it was something I had unknowingly been doing my entire career.

In my earlier days, the technology to automatically collect and manipulate grocery trading data didn’t exist or it was financially unviable for most businesses, so learning the basics of Excel was the only answer for most people. I’m pretty sure that the ‘best’ analysts at the time were simply those with the best Excel skills rather than those able to interpret the data in the best way or make the best recommendations from their insightful analysis of the data. SKUtrak uses tools and techniques that automate data collection and transformation, taking away all of the pre-analysis pain, leaving data consumers to do what they are paid for; making decisions with confidence.

Monday morning rush

I hear endless stories about Category Managers spending their Sundays downloading data from retailer systems just so they have enough time at 6 am on a Monday to get the bare minimum of insight together for their retail customers in time for 9 am meetings. Automated data collection and transformation means less time wrangling data, and visualisation tools and techniques enable faster and deeper analysis, turning account managers, category managers and sales analysts into category experts who can build meaningful, collaborative relationships with their customer counterparts.

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“One of our retail customers asks us to provide update reports first thing on a Monday morning. Previously, that meant asking a category manager to work through most of their Sunday. SKUtrak reduces that task from around six hours to just one, which is a much more reasonable request.”

Karl Frestle, Commercial Director for Grocery at Hain Daniels

So, what next?

Embrace change – I’m old enough to remember the sweet chimes of my 56k dial-up modem connecting me to the internet, something long passed and replaced by 1Gb fibre-enabled broadband – both will connect me to the internet, but I have no desire to spend time waiting to stream my favourite TV show or film. Why wouldn’t we apply this same logic to data analysis? Let’s free the analysts of this world to be able to analyse, not slow them down with tasks that are pointless and most definitely unnecessary in this day and age.

Want to see SKUtrak in action? If you would like to discuss how to avoid number crunching, please contact us.