Example: Distributor succeeds in standardizing all of its manufacturer required reporting and in creating a database of all of its internal sales data for data mining, analyzing & visualization dashboards for all of its business with more than 950 retail store delivery and sales points. Established a scorecard for its own salesforce and go-to-market initiatives.

Situation:

• A leading USA Distributor of specialty pet foods and allied pet supplies needed to standardize all of its requested and required manufacturer volume and business reporting.
• Generally manufacturer requests were similar in nature with either scheduled or ad-hoc requests. These requests for reports and RFI’s would greatly “stress-out” Distributor resources.
• The challenge was to help the distributor reorganize all of its sales by manufacturer data and assemble it all for intense and quick mining and queries and to develop a standardized manufacturer monthly report.
• The opportunity was in reducing complexity, eliminating duplication of effort and chronic waste while creating standardized reporting that captured all if not more that each manufacturer was requesting and to generate the reports automatically through the RNI Sales Accelerator Dashboard’s reporting tools.
• Insights from the data would also help the Distributor to identify stores on its list where there also were opportunities to build the business across brands and categories. It would help the Distributor to understand brands and categories that may be getting serviced from another source or distributor.

Action:

• The Distributor Leadership Group assembled an in-house task force from sales, IT and Finance   to work hand-in-hand with the RNI Team to identify the specific data feeds, data formats and end-use reports needed.
• RNI’s Data Management Team worked closely Distributor to secure the important data feeds and to set up an automated API to the RNI data store.
• RNI created a new data warehouse from all available data and created a data repository focused on manufacturers, categories products and specific retail outlets.
• RNI created and put into place its Business & Sales Accelerator Platform and Dashboards which would be used for client data mining, report generation, internal business analytics and insights for action.

Results:

• The RNI Sales Accelerator Platform & Dashboard™ was put into action for the Distributor.
• The Distributors own highly granular datasets were analyzed by the sales department in understanding business development and sales opportunities.
• The Distributor’s Account Management team was able to contain the RFI and Manufacturer reporting process to a standardized data and insight rich deliverable.
• The reporting in general raised the Distributor to a “best in class” standing.
• The Distributor has also succeeded in elimination of nearly all ad-hoc information requests from manufacturers and now if ad-hoc requests do come in the RNI Dashboard and data mining capabilities generates the report in seconds versus what was hours and days.
• RNI is retained by the Client for ongoing data management, housing and dashboard development and hosting.