The Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is now in the “Digitally Enabled Shopper Era” and is faced by increasing demands of the omni-channel ecosystem. In order to achieve sustained business results and to stay at pace with competition, companies are left with no choice but to embark on a digital transformation journey, in collaboration with their trading partners.
Funding trade promotion continues to be seen as strategic for enhanced trading partner collaboration. Trade spends around 15 to 25% of revenues are typical of progressive CPG businesses. However the mostly post facto, rear view mirror and often delayed assessments of trade funds ROI are still prevalent and are inadequate to drive timely course corrections and adjustments to drive trade campaign effectiveness. Tighter engagement with the digital savvy consumers across channels requires real time visibility to event specific performance indicators and cognitive capabilities for ongoing optimization of campaign and funds.
Trade funding and managing the e2e campaign process is a cross functional activity, involving sales, marketing, supply chain and finance departments. Often, disparate systems and unavailability of timely data to understand and control is a constraint. Integrated solutions with powerful predictive capabilities that leverage channel/consumer insights and analytics, enables transformation towards a more dynamic optimization and monitoring of trade funds.
Wipro Promax Analytics Solutions (WPAS), a part of Wipro Limited, is a leading provider of solutions and services for Trade Promotion Management and Optimization (TPx) for the CG and Pharma industries. The Promax solutions have evolved across decades of experience in collaboration with global consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers, and caters to multiple markets across the globe.
According to Dinesh Rathi, General Manager and Business Head of Wipro Promax, “Our focus and investments are more towards Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO), where customers can plan their promotions predictively. They can simulate various promotional scenarios and review its impact on financial and volumetric outcomes (constrained optimization). Promax Optimize is designed for business users using advanced Microservices Architecture and Machine Learning Algorithms. The solution can bolt-on to any existing Trade Promotion Management (TPM) systems and can interface with internal and external data sources.
Our customers have gained several qualitative and quantitative benefits such as visibility to the most effective promotion tactics and pricing strategies and savings in operating income. The customer now has a single consolidated trade promotion planning and analytics solution to provide users with visibility to both predicted and actual key individual promotion KPIs.”
Wipro Promax Solution Suite for Trade Promotion Management and Optimization
Promax Advanced is a Trade Promotion Management/Optimization (TPx) solution while Promax Optimize is a dedicated Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) solution that can be bolt-on to any third party TPM. Wipro also offers Integrated Trade Services for Trade Promotions covering Data Science as a Service, Analytics and Reporting as a Service and Business Process Consulting.
Both Promax Advanced and Promax Optimize can be deployed on premise or on cloud. The depth of functionalities offered by the Promax suite of solutions is complemented by Wipro’s rapid implementation and support capabilities across the globe, a strong R&D team working on enhancements to the product and best-in-class data scientists and business solution consultants working with CPG customers to generate tangible business outcomes. Ranging from end-to-end promotion management to effective trade spend optimization using advanced analytics and predictive planning, the Promax suite of comprehensive solutions and services are packaged to deliver exceptional returns from trade spend.
Wipro’s Consumer Goods practice aims to help its clients build great brands by connecting better with their consumers. Wipro’s strategy for CG industry is to help customers accelerate growth in their existing portfolios and to build new capabilities to drive consumer engagement. Wipro brings its domain expertise in enabling digital transformation, omni-channel commerce, value chain optimization and advanced analytics to ‘meet’ and ‘shape’ customer expectations. In the past couple of years, Wipro has made substantial investments in Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud and Start-ups to improve its services and capabilities in order to serve clients better. Trade Promotion, and Promax, is a part of Wipro’s larger vertical focus on Integrated Sales and Marketing (ISM). ISM brings together various data streams and processes that help consumer goods companies to move from sensing consumer demand to driving consumer behavior.
Dinesh Rathi, says, “We collaborate with customers to generate sustained business benefits. This entails moving beyond the specific IT services and solutions to identify and transform processes creatively.
Besides, we have been continuously adding new functionalities and advanced capabilities to the TPM product, Promax Advanced, based on market needs. In the latest release of the product, we worked on simplification to provide an enhanced usability to customers. The configurable summary dashboard allows each business user to have a relevant and intuitive view of metrics facilitating actionable insights.”
Wipro Promax solutions have sophisticated Business Intelligence capabilities and dashboards tailored to each stakeholder to provide pertinent information at a glance. The highly visual and intuitive user interface provides business users with a seamless user experience. Wipro Promax also offers Analytics Services, providing a full range of data cleansing, transformation, and data consolidation services to help CG companies have a comprehensive promotional data repository.
A key advantage of opting for Wipro over any other TPx solution provider is that there is no involvement of any third party vendor for the implementation or on-going support of Promax solutions across the globe. Additionally, being part of the larger organization – Wipro, CPG companies can leverage Wipro’s capabilities in domain consulting, big data, digital, AI, cloud, hyper-automation and other services.
From reactive transactional to proactive and predictive
We are in the times of digital transformation where companies are struggling to capture and make effective use of data. Data driven decision making eliminates uncertainty to a large extent. Therefore, companies which embark on a digital transformation journey sooner are likely to gain a competitive edge.
Wipro enables its customers with cutting edge technology and acts as a partner, leading our customers to the forefront in terms of digital and cognitive capabilities, with a sharp focus on the business outcomes that we create for our customers.
Most CPG companies in the developed markets today, have some form of Trade Promotion Management (TPM) tools. Such tools provide transactional improvements but lack the capability for ROI analysis and promotion optimization. Wipro’s Promax Optimize (TPO) provides companies with a platform to integrate “data” from multiple systems, converts large volumes of data into useful information and consumes such data for forecasting. Built on an industry leading BI technology stack, Promax Optimize offers a rich repository of core reports to allow users to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of their trade promotion decisions. The solution is scalable and configurable, and provides flexibility to create ad-hoc reports and role based personal dashboards with seamless integration to smart devices such as iPads/ phones, tablets etc.
Promax Optimize extends the capabilities of any TPM tool via improvements in:
1 Supply Planning – as accurate predictive demand signals inform production decisions and inventory levels.
2 Cash Management – as effective and accurate planning helps the business predict and manage trade spend accruals.
3 Profitability – as companies allocate resources to those promotions that provide the best return on trade investment, remember what gets measured typically gets improved.
4 Collaboration with trade partners – by defining mutually agreed and sustainable success metrics for promotional activity.
5 Visibility – to best and worst promotional plans, tactics and pricing inputs thus maximizing ROI on trade spends.
About Wipro’s Consumer Goods Practice
Wipro is a leading IT, consulting and business process services company that delivers winning business outcomes through its deep industry experience and 360 degree view of “Business through Technology.” By combining digital strategy, customer-centric design, advanced analytics and product engineering approach, Wipro helps its clients create successful and adaptive businesses. Wipro’s Consumer Goods practice helps its clients build great brands and reengineer the way they connect their brands to their consumers by moving ahead from insight to foresight.
To know more about how Wipro helps CPG industry leaders do business better, visit http://www.wipro.com/industries/consumer-goods/
Source :- The 10 Most Promising BI and Analytics Solution Providers 2018
