Premium Alcoholic Beverages Company: Next-generation Trade Promotion Management Tools

Accenture worked with the company (with operations in the Asia-Pacific region) to implement the Accenture CAS platform, which helped the company significantly improve how pricing and promotions were communicated to its sales force operations. This resulted in a holistic view of trade spend and customer profitability, and effective retail execution.

The changing retail landscape presented numerous challenges to this alcoholic beverages company, such as the following:

• A massive shift in sales volumes from regional trade or independent liquor stores to supermarkets.

• A significant change in consumer brand loyalty and preferences in beer and alcohol consumption.

The company’s pricing and promotion system architecture did not provide sufficient flexibility or reporting capability. It lacked daily margin reporting and visibility into the deals and promotions a customer received.

The company wanted to structure its processes and data to stay ahead of the shifting brand loyalties and create the right retail execution. It aimed to maximize the performance of its existing core businesses, optimize value and seek growth opportunities in domestic and international export markets, and turned to Accenture to build a pricing and promotion application.

We implemented the Accenture CAS trade promotion management and reporting software to deliver:

• Better transparency on promotional planning and tracking of trade spend.

• Daily financial accruals (versus monthly accruals).

• A new pricing module to replace the old one.

One of the main objectives of the project was to provide easy reporting on the buckets of spend—customer, product and event. We implemented Accenture CAS, which follows a closed-loop process.

• Develop the product strategy

• Develop the trade promotion plan

• Approve the trade promotion plan with the customer

• Execute the plan at retail

• Payment settlement with customer

• Evaluate the trade promotion plan

The new system enabled the company to monitor the process in real-time via a single portal.

We helped the alcoholic beverages company deliver important trade promotion and pricing information to its sales force. With the implementation of Accenture CAS, the company has the ability to:

• See updated profit contribution on a daily basis.

• Review executive dashboard integration.

• Drive new workflow for retail relationship, trade promotion, and pricing process and management approach.

We helped the company develop capabilities to forecast baseline and promotional business, based on trusted data and processes. It optimized the execution of trade promotions, improved product shipping to retailers and achieved precision in measuring customer profitability.

The company also benefited from a holistic view of trade spend and effectiveness, which includes both historical and predictive analysis, and a fully integrated data model for reporting and analytics.