With up to 50% of the sales and marketing budget spent on trade promotions, effective promotion management is key to maximizing the return from sales and marketing spends for consumer packaged goods enterprises.
Here is how Mindtree helped one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies develop a unified trade promotions management solution and implement it across the world.
The challenge
In the absence of a global trade promotion management system, each of the customer's country and business units planned trade promotions independently, often in an ad hoc way that did not leverage knowledge gleaned from past promotions for optimized return on investment (ROI). The enterprise approached Mindtree to:
- Rationalize its processes and create a global trade promotion management (TPM) system that would harmonize processes across the world; and assist it with the substantial change management this would necessitate
- Build a product that was flexible enough to allow countries to plan promotions based on their understanding of their customers, and of the product lines most applicable to them
- Integrate this new system with heterogeneous local systems
Our solution
Mindtree built a global solution christened OPSO HD (Optimizing Promotion Sell-out High Definition) to meet the customer’s needs, and implemented it in four phases over two years.
OPSO HD design
Mindtree designed the solution to work at the promotion planning and promotion evaluation stages of the trade promotion lifecycle. In addition to the core trade promotion process, OPSO HD was also designed to support processes such as budget allocation and funds management.
OPSO HD implementation
The implementation was split into four phases over a two-year period because of the challenging nature of the customer's heterogeneous regional environments. The implementation called for a single solution to be instituted in 30 countries, each having its own processes, technologies and decision makers. Mindtree implemented the solution through four phases as follows:
- Phase one: Studied customer processes, gathered business requirements and conducted early-stage planning.
- Phase two: Completed the technical architecture, implemented limited business-critical modules and retrofitted business processes.
- Phase three: Implemented further modules, corrected business process deviations based on findings in previous phases and conducted a go-live in two countries to test the system and get stakeholder feedback.
- Phase four: Implemented non-business modules alongside business modules, completed business process unification and consolidated all phases of the implementation. Following the successful completion of phase four, go lives were conducted across 30 countries.
Business impact
- A standardized promotions process
- Greater compliance with policy, thanks to standard rule-based work flows
- Greater organizational learning and planning efficiency with up-to-date ROI information and historical data
- Greater ease of use with a one-stop shop for promotions, budgets and outcomes
- Enablement of strategic decision making through robust analytics
