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Top Line:
A major soft drink manufacturer uses XP3® Suite to automate
the process of recommending brand lineups to foodservice accounts.
Situation:
Recently, a major soft drink manufacturer came to Interactive
Edge looking to automate the time consuming process of recommending
profitable brand assortments to fast food and convenience
accounts for various fountain lineups. In the past, this was
a manual process. Sales personnel would analyze demographic
and historical sales information to determine sales potential.
Then they would apply common sense to create a varied lineup.
Goal:
Success in the project was defined as automatically generating
both graphic representations and actionable recommendations
on a monthly basis for each of about 1,200 scenarios (combinations
of bottler ownerships, geographic locations and number of
fountain valves). These finished presentations were to be
available via the web for sales reps.
Action Taken:
Using its XP3 tool, Interactive Edge integrated Spectra demand
indices by geography with historical sales data from a syndicated
provider to determine the potential share of each brand present
within a market. From there, the logic was put in place to
recommend only brands that were present in the bottler's portfolio.
To ensure that a varied lineup was presented to the consumer,
when the tool found that a non-cola was the best choice, it
was asked to see that each flavor was used only once, unless
a certain potential share threshold was crossed. At that point,
the tool would begin searching for additional brands of potentially
profitable flavors. Using this methodology, XP3 took the guesswork
out of selecting brands.
To push updates out to the field on a monthly basis, Interactive
Edge used the automation capabilities of XP3 to load and integrate
updated data into the tool, refresh each presentation and
post the completed analyses to the customer's web portal.
Key Benefits:
- Using XP3 Suite, the manufacturer was able to provide
a consistent and fact-based approach to a situation
that, in the past, was primarily subjective.
- The manufacturer was able to free up valuable time
for its sales force to focus on strategic initiatives at
its partner accounts.
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