A digital transformation journey is also a change management journey where specific challenges need to be overcome, and by addressing them it enables the company to show the common needs there are across the business. These challenges are that different markets will have different starting points, they have different ways of working and processes, and they may believe they need full customisation. Its key to work through these challenges in order to aim for an 80/20 approach to meeting global and local needs. Why do I say this? By aligning needs, business models and processes with the design of the technology solution enables a shift in change management and ways of working to achieve consistency whilst also empowering individuals to contribute directly to growth. It’s also important to strike a balance between governance and monitoring with user needs and experience, as the latter is critical to ensuring adoption and a high level of engagement.
"A digital transformation journey is also a change management journey where specific challenges need to be overcome, and by addressing them it enables the company to show the common needs there are across the business."
There are three key steps to enhancing trade promotion management and equipping your company for success, they are:
- Redesign – collating needs and engaging stakeholders to understand efficient ways of working and processes, and what the ‘To Be’ way of working could look like
- Unify – connecting the needs to form a base framework of commonalities that creates simplification and consistency
- Embrace – streamline and automate data and process management to unlock insights that enable optimisation and profitable growth potential across brands and markets
The first step is redesign, it is absolutely key that from the top-down the business is clear on what success looks like, and growth ambitions are set for the future before starting a digital transformation journey. With this roadmap in mind, we can facilitate assessing data, processes, channels and users and collate needs across multiple markets in a transparent way.
Next, it’s important to create unification as much as possible to establish a consistent way of working across the business whilst recognising the unique needs of the markets. In order to do this with user buy-in we collate needs from users focusing on the ‘To Be’ way of working rather than the ‘As Is’ across multiple markets. Given all markets have a common vision in regard to the transformation of capabilities and ways of working to drive growth, and this shared vision enables simplification, sharing of best practices and improved collaboration. Why is this so critical? Having users on board from the start enables experience, creativity, and ingenuity to be tapped into, and helps the company to go from one that merely collects and acts on data insights to one that effectively deploys the data insights into an agile trade promotion management strategy, across multiple markets. Together with the business colleagues, the project team agree on a base framework of functionality and how to cluster the markets to enable implementation to be completed in waves. This way success realised in a live market, can be shared with a market about to go live to advance their readiness.
Finally, and of course not least, a well implemented trade promotion management solution can deliver data techniques that can track trade promotions in real time, producing reports that enable fast optimisation. Relying on a solution that includes a repository of functionalities that can be enabled and disabled according to specific needs, FMCGs have the power to secure optimal alignment between technology and business values and objectives, in a way that fits with the company’s culture and ways of working. This is the secret to success, being able to build, align and implement the solution to do exactly what you need it to do.
I am Alan Shankland, Head of Services at Kantar XTEL and I’ve worked with many multi-national companies to evolve their trade promotion management over the years. I look forward to continuing to work with more in the future, and I hope you will be one of them.
Read more on our proven approach to implementing digitalised trade promotion across multi-markets in a downloadable practical guide.