Applications that Combine Analytical Intelligence and Operational Execution in CPG

In the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, take almost any medium-to-large company within it, and there are what are known enterprise applications that perform key core functions of the company like order-to-cash, logistics, accounting, and the like. Then there might also be some decision support systems—something that takes data from the enterprise applications that support functions of the company—and combines them so that performance, efficiency, and profitability of the company can be measured and managed over time. Such decision support and analysis systems also help in analyzing Customer and Products, identifying opportunities and risks, and may in some manner—more often than not manually rather than automatically, get manipulated, combined, and synthesized in some way back into a planning system—whether it be demand planning, sales and trade promotions planning, brand P&L planning, corporate planning and budgeting, and so forth. Then, since some of these functionally siloed planning systems need to reconciled, there might be some type of IOP (Integrated Operating Plan) or S&OP (Sales & Operational Planning) system that those systems have to feed into so that the company can look at all the ways they plan and what they plan to do and come to some type of consensus, be able to project revenue and profit down to EBITDA—and decide where strategic decisions can be made as a company. The bigger the company, the more complex this landscape of systems can become.

A newer hybrid breed of supporting systems takes analytical intelligence and merges it with the ability to do something with it—to say, analyze performance and identify opportunities and risk, plan with it in the same system, ask what-if questions with it, incorporate other external market data, assess impact on the fly of shifting an investment in one customer or brand to another, and to within minutes showing what impact that would have on volume and sales all the way down to a quarterly EBITDA level.

A newer hybrid breed of supporting systems takes analytical intelligence and merges it with the ability to do something with it

At Hybrid Intelligence, one of the things we do is build this hybrid breed of supporting systems for CPG companies—and even for other software companies who have sophisticated analytical intellectual capital and proprietary research-backed algorithms for looking at and analyzing data—and we help them to take things into a level of operational execution at companies—i.e., taking it from analytical into the execution aspect from the insights derived. At one such company, TABS Analytics, these types of enabling hybrid applications have been developed for them by Hybrid Intelligence in both the Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) and the Integrated Operational Planning/Forecasting areas—and they are able to harness their analytical intellectual property and provide further services to their CPG clients who need to harness those insights into an operational process of the company right away at the speed of thought.

If your company is looking into these newer generation of analytically-driven applications, we suggest you look for these benefits from a business perspective:

• Will such an application help you focus on what’s relevant to you and provide new ways to derive insights and then help you take actions with those insights?
• Will such an application help you collaborate and dialog with others in your function and your company to take analysis, analytics, and insights right into the operational and functional realms?
• Will such an application help minimize complexity from trying to analyze information in one place and somehow prepare it and get it into some other place to take action from it?

In quick summary, this newer generation of hybrid interactive applications can help to enable analytics and business insights and then do something and execute from and become operational and collaborative immediately with less friction. Ultimately, your company’s data, analysis, and analytics should fully enable you to be key contributors to the development and execution of the business’ strategy--and we posit that such applications that combine analytical intelligence and operational execution can help to enable this and therefore have the potential to create tremendous value in an organization quickly.