P&G Masters Out-Of-Stock Analysis
To better enable the analysis of huge data sets and glean valuable insights, The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) (www.pg.com) partnered with Verix (www.verix.com). The resulting insights, called Intelligent Business Alerts (IBA), enable P&G’s novel way of managing business operations — Management by Exception.The partnership’s first application to go live and deliver significant business value was the Out Of Stock application, deployed in thousands of retail stores carrying P&G products.
For consumer goods manufacturers, a lot of factors may play a role in creating unexpected out-of-stock situations — competitive pressures, social opinion, marketing campaigns, and in-store promotion, to name a few.
P&G needed to quickly identify and focus on the handful of issues that truly matter to the business and require management’s attention. These issues would be the exceptions from the norm; exceptions that point to an upcoming out-of-stock situation before it becomes an actual problem, and facilitate its prevention. Further, these exceptions have to be put in context to actually understand what drove the situation and how to deal with its root cause rather than react to the symptoms.
The Out Of Stock application enables P&G to process all of its products offered in a certain store and any out-of-stock conditions. The application analyzes all this information and focuses the store execution resources on the greatest value alerts.
Today, high-value and extremely accurate exception alerts are being sent daily for a range of on-shelf product availability issues. P&G’s field sales reps take action on these in store and the headquarter teams drive root cause and preventative actions.
In 2014, the Out of Stock application will be further deployed across leading retail chains worldwide. For each chain, the application will be tweaked to maximize predictive accuracy and ensure optimal results.
FAST FACTS
All Things Considered
P&G’s headquarters team observed a significant change using an out-of-stock application, which allows business users to quickly identify and understand exceptional competitive and market events, ranked by importance, and supported with contextual insights for fast decisions and actions.
“Verix allows us to laser focus on the key exceptions that matter and that allows us to understand what’s driving those exceptions so we can take action.”
— Guy Peri, Business Analysis Leader, P&G
A Good Problem
P&G today receives petabytes of daily data, which is growing exponentially. The company needed a solution that would help make sense of all this data in an efficient manner.
Management By Exception
P&G strives to deploy the Management By Exception method across its commercial operations, by automating the analysis of more processes and enabling self-serve analytical capabilities to all business users.