"SIMPLE" CATEGORY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION
FOR SALES & MARKETING COMPANIES
Developed by
BEAN&BEAN CONSULTING, INC.
CONTENTS
OVERVIEW AND PURPOSE OF SIMPLE
Real Life Illustrations of Use at
Sales and Marketing Companies
System Administrator Responsibilities
System Operator Responsibilities
SYSTEM OPERATION: - RETRIEVING DATA
FROM ACNIELSEN OR IRI
REPORT TYPES (Delivered in ExcelÔ or LotusÔ)
Brand and SKU Performance and
Productivity
POWERPOINT™ PRESENTATION TYPES
OVERVIEW AND PURPOSE OF SIMPLE
Use BEAN&BEAN's SIMPLE Category Management system to:
standardize the
category management/fact-based selling report formats, to make it easier for
Account Managers to become comfortable, knowledgeable and effective in using
Category Management information.
provide outputs in
presentation-ready, actionable form.
allow access to
information through a totally intuitive, SIMPLE menu suitable for non-technical
users.
fully automate and
maximize efficiency of access to IRI and ACNielsen databases
·
seamlessly integrate
reports from other data sources (e.g. consumer, financial or shipment
information)
In short, maximize the productivity of your
marketing resources, and increase the selling effectiveness of your Sales people!
Real Life Illustrations of Use at Sales and
Marketing Companies
(1)
Productivity
With so many account
presentations and category reviews to prepare, time is at a premium. Using SIMPLE, together with its ShowOff
presentation module, allows account managers and category managers to put
together in a couple of hours presentations that previously took more than a
day!
(2) The Need to Use those Databases!
A manufacturer wanted
to have key field Sales managers and Broker A.E.’s using their scan databases. Should they require everyone to directly
work with IRI’s Analyzer or ACNielsen’s INF*ACT Workstation? Instead, “SIMPLE” provided a very effective
solution without demanding extra training and PC hardware/software.
(3) The Topline Information Source
A sophisticated sales
and marketing agency with a strong Marketing Department wanted to have an
instant source for their A.E.’s of topline market and account data for all of
their key categories. BEAN&BEAN’s
“SIMPLE” software was their quick and SIMPLE solution!
(4) Too Much Demand, Not Enough Resources!
Marketing Services
was being buried with requests from customers and principals for regular,
in-depth reporting and analysis of category performance. The solution - installing SIMPLE to handle
large chunks of the report needs automatically overnight. This supplied the rest of the organization
with almost all their scan data information needs, while jump-starting the
marketing analysts on in-depth category analyses.
System Administrator Responsibilities
The system
administrator should have some familiarity with the databases being accessed by
SIMPLE, and be able to select the segments and specific products to be run in
certain of the reports. He/she may be
responsible for setting up the system for use at multiple branch locations,
specifically the setup and maintenance of the configuration files that include
specification of markets, categories and databases.
System Operator Responsibilities
The system operator
may be the same person as the administrator, but can be technically much less
skilled. The responsibilities of the
system operator (e.g. at a branch location) are:
installation of
the SIMPLE software on PC's
downloads; getting
data into network directory accessible to users; ensuring critical categories
& markets are run in timely fashion.
Note that IRI and/or ACNielsen software is required to execute
downloads!
End-Users
Users can be anyone
with access to the network/s on which the downloaded data resides via a PC with
SIMPLE (and Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3) loaded. Users make selections of market and category via a simple menu screen, the corresponding
data is automatically copied from the network server, and they can then view,
print or work with any of the finished reports. Senior management, Business Managers, account executives, space
management analysts and retail supervisors all benefit from SIMPLE.
USER ACCESS TO REPORTS
BEAN&BEAN
Consulting believes in "Sales-user-friendly", presentation-ready
output. The system is designed for a
non-technical AE, for example, to be able to easily get what he/she needs. The following pictures illustrate the
process and outputs.
On starting SIMPLE,
the user is brought straight to the Reports menu screen, where he/she selects
the category, market and retailer for which information is sought, using the
drop-down menus on the left side of the screen.
At each step,
messages in the box at lower right indicate the next appropriate selection to
make.
With the choices
made, the set of report options becomes visible, based on data that has been
downloaded by the system operator and resides on the network (or local)
drive. You will also see a summary of
the current selections in the lower left corner of the screen, and
helpful messages will
be shown in the box on the bottom right.
If no reports are available for the selected market and category, this
will be indicated. If reports are available,
their run date and period ending date will be shown in the box on the left side
of the screen, so that you can see how current they are.
On selecting a report
(clicking on the report name to highlight it), the available options such as
sales measure and format (e.g. detailed report, or pie or bar charts) are
shown. For example, the user has here
selected the "Category by Brand" report, which can be viewed in
units, dollars or equivalent volume units.
If one of the promotion trend reports was picked, the user would be
shown a list of up to 20 products for which those reports are available (in a
variety of formats).
With the measure and format selected, just click the
"View" icon on the toolbar to preview, or to print, just click the
Printer icon! To edit, just
double-click on the chart to be taken into Excel (or Lotus, if that is the
software for which SIMPLE has been configured). You can then modify formats, etc, if you wish.
To return to the main
reports menu, click on the Reports icon on the toolbar. To print, click on the Printer icon.
In the all-important
area of item level data, BEAN&BEAN provides several report options. For
example, the Market Coverage Report ranks all items present in the market by
sales (units, dollars, or eq. volume), with %ACV distribution shown for each
both in the retailer (if carried) and the market. Not only is this a great “items not carried” tool, but we include
the percent coverage of market sales, a variety measure that many retailers
request
Amongst the other item ranking formats available in SIMPLE
is
the UPC Ranking Report, in which
you are given the opportunity to tailor the reporting to be more relevant. You
can choose to include/exclude private label items in the market, and set a
cutoff or minimum distribution (%ACV) for items to be reported.
You can also edit out irrelevant items (e.g. special packs or items merchandised in a different department), before the program runs an automatic "Items Not Carried" analysis, and reports the ranking of item sales for the account, showing both SKU's already carried, and other items available in the market but not currently carried, together with their distribution levels. Every item is “tagged” with the sub-category or segment to which it belongs, giving you the opportunity to re-sort the rankings by segment, if that proves useful. An important benefit of the UPC Ranking Report is the built-in option of automatic export to your choice of space management software.
SIMPLE includes a
Save/Open Scenario option (the diskette icon), making it easy to save complete
sets of reports to diskette or to the hard drive, for use off the network.
Multiple scenarios (i.e. the complete sets of reports for a specific geography
and category) can be saved to a single diskette within a couple of minutes, and
restored to the standard SIMPLE interface just by clicking File/Restore. On a larger scale, BEAN&BEAN’s
“Squeeze&Send” utility facilitates distribution of “SIMPLE” information to
remote users off the network.
The
“SIMPLE ShowOff” module builds PowerPoint™ presentations in the same way,
allowing non-technical users to build their own customer presentations with
exceptional productivity.
SYSTEM OPERATION: - RETRIEVING DATA FROM ACNIELSEN
OR IRI
Let us assume that
the operator (i.e., the person responsible for downloading data from IRI and
ACNielsen databases) has selected the Administrator main screen. He/she is then prompted to make category and
market selections. Th`e following
picture illustrates the process.
Downloading of
reports can be done in several ways: a single market or retailer request, an
ad-hoc batch of a small number of different geographies and categories, or
(most commonly) a Group Batch or “SuperGroup”. With a single pick, each
category can be set to run the complete set of reports for up to 300
geographies (which you have predefined as a group)! The system will automatically pull down the latest available data
for the selected time period (e.g. 13 or 52 weeks), unless the custom time
period option is selected.
For a small ACNielsen
database, with only a few hundred UPC's, the complete data retrieval for a
given geography can be as short as 5 minutes, ranging up to an hour or so for
the largest databases, especially when retrieving account level data (because
we pull UPC data for both account
and market). A typical IRI category
takes 5-15 minutes. This compares with
what could take several hours for an experienced analyst to specify and
retrieve all of the different types of data, including UPC codes, segment and
brand information, promotion reporting, in-depth category management analyses,
etc.
Note that the message
box keeps you updated on progress, and any problems encountered. When complete, the program will return to
the menu screen, and show a message stating that the download is
successful. Typically, batch downloads
are run overnight, without any need for attention. Utilities are therefore included to review the success of the
latest batch, and to obtain a complete status report of latest run dates for
every category and geography.
In the morning, all
of the reports will be available on the designated network drive, instantly
accessible to any SIMPLE user on the network, regardless of whether they
have IRI or ACNielsen software themselves.
The information they need, when
they need it, at their fingertips, and with minimal involvement of
marketing support staff! One analyst
can literally
support a hundred or
more users, maintaining 80 or more categories up-to-date for all relevant
markets and retailers, with BEAN&BEAN’s comprehensive suite of actionable
reports.
OTHER DATA SOURCES
SIMPLE has been
designed to be instantly adaptable to a wide range of information
delivery. For example, you can quickly
incorporate your own category summaries or consumer demographic reports into
the user menu. BEAN&BEAN Consulting
in conjunction with Ironbridge Software, Inc., can customize automated access
links to allow seamless integration of reports generated from your internal
management databases and delivery through SIMPLE to all those who need the
information. BEAN&BEAN’s
“Match&Merge” module can be used to incorporate POS retailer data,
comparing it to market level syndicated data.
Match&Merge can also be used to generate reports using customized,
retailer-specific, segmentation of a category.
What our clients have
said about “SIMPLE”:
- it’s scary, it’s so simple! (new
administrator)
- the easiest system we’ve ever
worked with (category management director)
- we’re very pleased with the
implementation and very positive about SIMPLE. (category management
director)
- (SIMPLE) allows everyone to
refocus their efforts on profitable, brand-building processes (sales
agency president)