Business Tip 12
Data Independent Templates

More than just saving time and promoting consistency

Templates can help save time and deliver a more consistent message across an organization’s multiple presentations and reports.  Pre-defined templates have helped streamline Category Management by providing structured analytics to the masses. However, templates eventually become stale and difficult to manage as an organization’s data management processes change. Over time, the data format no longer fits the template, and the creator of the template must begin the process over again, identifying best practices and translating them into a presentation. The template must then be reintroduced to other users in the organization, integrating the template back into the consistent message.

Independent of Data

Templates have helped the Consumer Goods Industry digest rapidly increasing amounts of data however robust analytics often cannot be addressed by rigid templates. As retailers and manufacturers embrace fact-based decision making, the need to tap deeper and broader sources of data is increasing, leading to the adoption of new sources of information and new ways to analyze data. A template that is compatible with virtually any type of data regardless of source or dimensionality (Nielsen, IRI, NPD, JDA, Diver, Edifice, etc.) can be a major benefit to an organization by being flexible enough to address various multiple business issues. No matter what type of data users prefer, their presentations continue to be a part of the organization’s one message.

Library 2.0

Category Management, sales analytics, and business intelligence teams are tasked with defining best practices for customer-facing teams. Field sales are tasked with applying the right data to best practices to help drive the business forward. By housing templates in a shared library, users can make notes about each template, such as how they use it, or other possible applications for it, to share with co-workers. Users can benefit the organization by sharing their experiences using the templates with each other and pooling their knowledge. Eventually, a library of templates will become a large catalog of best practices for the organization and it will become necessary to find a way to categorize and organize all of the slides in order to truly recognize any efficiencies.

The classic system of assigning templates to category is inefficient for a template designed to work with any data source. Instead, a system of tags, where a template is assigned a series of key words to describe its function, is a quick and easy way to both organize templates and allow them to be quickly found by the user via a filtering system.

The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.