Consumer Products Best Practices
Today’s Consumer Product (CP) firms face starker pressures than in any recent decade. The recent Great Recession migrated market share away from branded products to private label, and some of the share will never move back. Meanwhile, an increasingly powerful handful of retailers continue to gain points of distribution, making it harder to leverage a wide group of retailers to make an impact on volume. Finally, a bifurcation of demand toward the two poles of low price or high quality is leaving many products in a middle ground no-man’s land. In the midst of these dynamic new changes, retailers are increasingly providing demand data and asking CPs to clean it and analyze it to help with forecasting, store optimization, and out-of-stock reduction. Meanwhile, the Information Technology group at the CP is typically handling multiple global ERP instances simultaneous with changes in the ERP-driven business intelligence tool.
With basket sizes getting smaller or standing pat, the quality of research and development involved in introducing higher-margin new products becomes paramount. As scientists, chefs, and product innovators are cycled in and out of R&D, the biggest risk of inefficiency is CPs doing a poor job of knowledge management—best practices, insights, experimental results can walk out the door with a contributor.
These trends and challenges are driving the world’s most exciting brand companies to formulate strategies around smarter and more defensive assortments; aiding and collaborating with retailers for everything from store inventory to consumer-centric loyalty analytics; enabling data mining on enterprise R&D information; and generating shopper insights—all in the context of faster performance of the ERP business intelligence tool.
What if a suite of solutions for these challenges were all leveraging the world’s simplest and fastest purpose-built data warehouse appliance? In fact, Netezza is the most credible solution for most CP data warehouses. Netezza knows point-of-sale data: we power the world’s largest retail data warehouse by store count. What about consumer analytics? Netezza powers the world’s most successful suite of shopper insights tools. Also important is ensuring a new ERP BI tool works blazingly fast: companies using the most popular BI tool run more than 150 of these projects on Netezza. So while you may have never heard of Netezza, the solution providers providing you with data, insights, and targeted promotions rely on Netezza every minute for hundreds of terabytes of data storage, processing and analytics.
