Example: Client succeeds in creating a database and data mining & visualization dashboard for all of its distributors servicing independent pet specialty stores and established a knowledge center of understanding the white-space and untracked areas of its business.

Situation:

• A leading manufacturer-marketer of specialty pet food had little to no understanding of where its business was at with the fast growing pet specialty food segment among independently owned and operated pet-specialty stores. These are stores supplied by distributors for the pet food and supplies categories.
• The challenge was to work with each of distributor to secure monthly data feeds identifying for all of the manufacturers products delivered and sold to the respective store base. Then to organize, scrub and assemble all of the data by distributor into one database for data mining, analytics and opportunity-issue insights.
• There were also instances of dual-distributorship of product to individual stores.
• Insights from the data would then be identified as action items for manufacturer’s sales organization and the distributors to focus on to close the distribution voids and optimize product availability across categories.

Action:

• The Client Sales Leadership Group identified one of its own as a dedicated resource to open the conversation with each of the distributors and to identify the specific data feeds needed including historical data for 12 months earlier.
• RNI’s Data Management Team worked closely with each of the Distributors IT departments to secure the monthly data feeds and to set up an automated API to the RNI data store.
• RNI created a baseline from all available data and created a rich dataset focused on products and retail outlet availability versus the official manufacturer SKU list for distribution.
• Highly granular distributor-specific and store-specific data was gathered, scrubbed and organized to RNI specific standards.
• RNI created and put into place a high utility database for client data mining, analytics and insights for action.

Results:

• The RNI Sales Accelerator Platform & Dashboard™ was put into action with a large number of additional client-specific dashboards for immediate data analytics and visualization. 
• All datasets were assembled and fed into the RNI data store.
• The highly granular product and retail store data by distributor was analyzed by the Client’s sales planning support group and then shared with specific sales managers for opportunity resolution.
• Client Sales personnel were impressed with the RNI Sales Accelerator Dashboard™ its ease of use, capabilities, functionality and ability to generate visualized data-based opportunities and requested its licensed deployment down to the individual salesperson level.
• The entire Client sales organization now uses the RNI Sales Accelerator Platform & Dashboards™ to measure, manage and improve every aspect of its business with independent pet specialty stores and the distributor network that supplies the products route to market.
• Active client engagement from the data mined insights from the highly differentiated data have resulted in an ongoing 37% increase in sales in year over year performance.

RNI has been retained by the Client for expansion of this project to other areas of its business with chain stores and POS data feeds.