Accenture CAS—Trade Promotion Management and Optimization for the Consumer Goods Industry

Consumer goods companies can gain a major competitive advantage and position themselves for high performance with Accenture CAS Trade Promotion Management.

The trade promotion management (TPM) challenge is by no means insignificant. Consumer goods companies spend substantial amounts of time and money—14 percent of revenue, according to an AMR Research study—on promotions with retailers designed to boost revenue or increase/protect market share (or both).

It’s clear that a new approach to TPM is needed—one that can help consumer goods companies break the cycle of spending substantial sums of money on promotions and getting little to show for it in return.

Such an approach must address some of the main obstacles to more effective TPM—which include well-entrenched business practices and behaviors, data and technology limitations and generally ineffective processes no longer relevant to today’s complex and largely global consumer goods supply chain.

Read more about Accenture CAS Trade Promotion Management and Optimization and how we can help consumer goods companies achieve high performance.

As a core component of Accenture Software, an organization dedicated to developing differentiated software-based solutions, Accenture CAS is part of a portfolio of software businesses helping organizations achieve high performance.

Using Accenture CAS, consumer goods executives have access to a powerful, integrated sales platform that uses trade promotion management and optimization to drive sales planning (volume and spending) to help organizations achieve high performance.

Accenture CAS is an integrated sales platform that delivers clear business benefits:

• Increased Visibility: Provides enterprise-wide visibility of all customer management and trade investment activities. A trade promotion portal allows manufacturers to eliminate cross-functional inefficiencies, improve supply-chain planning, and deliver a "single version of the truth."
  
  
• Maximizes Trade Investment Effectiveness: Through the measurement and analysis of all activities, organizations can benchmark historical investments, using this improved understanding to improve future decision making.
  
  
• Drives Operational Efficiency: Replaces disparate, disconnected systems to reduce administrative costs, enable ease of use and simplify adoption.
  
  
• Enhances Analytics Support: Includes out-of-the-box reporting and analytic capabilities including dashboards, interactive analysis and static reports.
  
  
• Increased User Adoption: User-centric design provides an intuitive interface that supports process-guided navigation and delivers a rich, new user experience.
  
  
• Adds Value to the Enterprise: Improves forecast accuracy and utilization of trade funds. Reduces retailer diversion, administrative/labor costs, deductions, trade fund overspend and forward buying.
  
  

Accenture CAS provides greater understanding of consumption data to illustrate the true net effect of promotions.

• Baseline Forecasts: Using historical data, Accenture CAS identifies base price and baseline volume, to predict baseline per stock keeping unit (SKU) and per week for the next fiscal year.
  
  
• Promotion Plan Optimization: Populates an account calendar with a promotion plan based on user controlled constraints (for example, volume, spend), to determine promoted SKUs, promotion types and promotion price, promotion frequency, timing and duration.
  
  
• Promotion Optimization: Determines the promotion types and price based on constraints (for example, volume, spend), determines promotion timing and duration as well as optimizing the cannibalization and halo effects.
  
  
• Data: Integrates with various data sources (scan/point of sale (POS), syndicated, promotion, calendar, product and store) and with advanced data cleansing and enrichment, correlates and clusters the data.
  
  

Read more about Accenture CAS.

Accenture CAS helps organizations achieve better business outcomes. A single, integrated sales platform based on 25 years of industry knowledge and experience, Accenture CAS helps organizations to scale fast and lower total cost of ownership.

Accenture CAS includes:

• Trade Promotion Management: Supporting closed loop promotion and account planning processes to gain visibility into trade investments, spending forecasts and customer profitability.
  
  
• Trade Promotion Optimization: Using analytics to provide account managers with deeper insight into the net effect of promotional activities and predictive models to optimize future category plans.
  
  
• Retail Execution: Improving sales performance by focusing field sales execution toward high-value visits and activities.
  
  
• Direct Store Delivery: Enabling manufacturers or consumer products organizations to manage sales orders, delivery, inventory and cash collection at a store level.
  
  
• Service Management: Support for field service and customer service to deliver an integrated customer experience.
  
  
• Digital Merchandising Service: This is an innovative and new technique to monitor in-store quality and compliance enabled by mobility software, market analytics and Accenture’s unique proprietary algorithms.
  
  

Read more about Accenture CAS.