Interactive Edge: XP3 Platform Empowering Category Management, Shopper Insights, Sales and Marketing

An industry leader in data analysis and presentation software for Consumer Goods and related industries, Interactive Edge  has been helping sales and marketing organizations improve productivity, enhance efficiency, and achieve brand consistency since 1995.
Interactive Edge’s award-winning XP3 platform is a set of business intelligence tools that are integrated with Microsoft Office.  It provides sales, category management, shopper insights analysts the ability to efficiently and effectively leverage virtually any data source to create, distribute and apply best practice analytics dynamically in PowerPoint and Excel.
In the CPG industry, data is dynamic, changing on a daily, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.  “It is challenging for those end-users who may not be data experts to make the appropriate selections so we created an interface for users downstream to create presentations and reports from raw data in minutes instead of days and weeks.  Data can be easily updated and the presentations using multiple data sources can be iterated across hundreds of retailers, markets, and categories, with one click,” remarks Zel Bianco President, CEO and Co-founder of Interactive Edge.  XP3 is completely integrated on the front end with MS-Office and to the most commonly used back-end, SQL Server/MSAS.
Time is of the essence in the fast-paced CPG sector.  A library of best practice analytics, presentations and reports can become a widely accessible center of excellence. Business users can create the reports once and then easily modify them to address the next account or customer.  “Our solution includes intelligent text built into each presentation.  The headlines, comments, charts and graphs get updated automatically to reflect the specific data points needed,” says  Bianco.
Throughout its history, Interactive Edges’ purpose remains the same – effective tools to turn data into insights that are easy to present and understand.  IE has a  long-standing relationship with the world’s leading consumer goods companies including Dr. Pepper, Frito-Lay, Hormel, Nestle’ and many more.
XP3 for Actionable Insights and Recommendations, Reduces Analysis Time
Acosta Sales & Marketing is one of the largest brokers in North America and uses XP3 as a core solution to deliver BI Analytics across their hundreds of manufacturer and retail customers. Acosta used PowerPoint and Excel as their final output, but the manual process was eating up a huge amount of man hours to complete data driven reporting.  To give you just one example, it would take Acosta 9 hours to generate three different presentations for one retailer after they developed the finished presentation.  They then needed to generate the same presentations for 96 retailers which took a total of 896 hours.  With XP3, the same process was reduced to 20 hours, saving 804 hours or 105 days.
Acosta’s 52 page presentation for Campbell’s would take Acosta 3 hours to customize for one retailer, and the process would then be repeated for each of their retailers. With XP3, the same report took only 2 minutes to create per retailer, which was a 99% savings, and while reporting for Starbucks, achieved 97% of efficiency, i.e. from 5 hours to 8 minutes. Clorox also returned dramatic results,  originally it took 3 to 5 hours to create a report for one retailer. After XP3, the same presentation took each retailer only 5 minutes to create which was a 98% savings.
Interactive Edge is partnering with some of the most dynamic data companies in the world including global companies like Nielsen, Acosta Sales and Marketing, JDA, and many more.