Can Integrated CPG Solutions Help in Boosting Top-Line Growth?

Only businesses that are analytically mature are able to deliver value to their customers and open new avenues for revenue growth. To achieve complete analytical maturity, businesses need to ingest data from various operational systems, combine them into a lone source, perform various cleaning mechanisms and analyze it. In other words, to achieve analytical maturity, businesses need to unify their data.

Most players in the CPG industry are in dire need of data unification. Given that they have several data sources – be it retail, ecommerce, POS, distribution, supply chain, marketing, etc., most managers spend their time in cleansing this data and try to manually piece together information. This is an arduous process, which is ripe for transformation.

The need of the hour is an integrated CPG solution that not only unifies data but also analyzes it using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to make CPG companies analytically mature.

Why CPG Companies Fail to Attain Analytical Maturity?

Limited Knowledge and Fear of Moving First

In fact, CPG organizations have the tools to capture data. However, they lack the capability to integrate and analyze it for decision making. While adopting integrated solutions is a long-term project, the integration facilitates insight-led decision making from the get-go and throughout the process. Executives could use these insights to predict and prescribe to profitable business outcomes.

A survey by Deloitte states that using an integrated solution helps unlock business value and boost ROI. What CPG companies fail to understand is that even if analytical evolution were to suddenly halt, the efforts made in attaining analytical maturity would keep them ahead of the competition. While competitors remain at the experimental stage, a CPG company that has begun the data unification process already delivers value to its customers.

Unifying and using granular customer data helps companies develop personalized approaches to engage with their customers, which directly influences top-line growth. The survey also found that even though many organizations are at the beginning of their analytics journey, 96% of the executives interviewed believed that next-gen analytics such as AI and ML will continue to grow importance over the coming years.

Decentralized Data and Fragmented Frameworks

Currently, a typical CPG organization that decentralizes its efforts to meet its business objectives fail to notice that functional operations cannot remain exclusive of each other. For example, the transactional data collected from retailers through POS devices needs to be integrated with the supply chain activities. Similarly, distribution strategies are influenced by product marketing. These functions are not exclusive to each other and combine forces to boost top-line growth.

Does Data Consolidation Help Reimagine Business Strategies?

Unintegrated and isolated data may be detrimental to the performance of a company. Even though these operations have a common goal – to increase top-line growth for the company – any effort to deliver value using fragmented data would only result in either slow growth or stagnation. This is because any move made to optimize one component of the business directly or indirectly impacts a different functional area. Data consolidation for such companies would require an integrated CPG solution. Now let’s see how integrated CPG solutions create value to boost its top-line growth.

Data Unification x Advanced Analytics = Business Decision Intelligence for Top-Line Growth

If you wish to deliver value to your customers, you will need to turn to data-driven decision making. This can be done by conducting predictive or prescriptive analysis through a single source data – even though its origins are fragmented. Data unification is the process of standardizing data that is sourced from various functions stored in varied formats within an organization. Moreover, using consolidated data will help your company to prioritize initiatives such as opt for personalized sales or make pricing adjustments.

For instance, the contribution of online purchases for your product was 3% before the pandemic and it increased to 22% during the pandemic. The data you gather for understanding the buying trends would circle around the sales made through substitute channels – online stores in this case. However, traditional tools would limit CPG organizations in figuring out channel-to-sale ratio which is not the ultimate challenge. With the help of AI/ML-backed integrated CPG solutions, CPG companies can predict these patterns and then prescribe initiatives to increase sales through these new trends and facilitate quick decision making.

Building a unified data foundation is the first step to improving top-line growth. The Analytics Advantage Survey revealed that data analytics tools directly support top-line growth because they streamline various income-generating initiatives. Success for most CPG companies lies in offering “customer-value-operations” and most functions of a business are guided by customer perspectives to create a successful top-line growth strategy.