Optimise your trade promotion management with Anaplan. Automate manual processes, gain real-time visibility into promotional data and make informed decisions for optimised spend and improved efficiency.
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Transcript
[Music] Bedford Consulting spotlight video. In this video, we’re looking at the ways that Anaplan can support trade promotions management that supports both the supply chain planning and financial planning use cases. If you require an in-depth demonstration, then please get in touch using the contact details available at the end of this video.
For those of you who might be new to Anaplan, it’s a cloud-based connected planning platform used to model every aspect of supply chain planning and SNOP, financial planning, workforce requirements, and more. Managing marketing promotions is commonly a complex and difficult process since it involves many areas of the business effectively collaborating to plan in advance, maintain while in progress, and then report the outcomes.
This demo will cover the creation and management of promotions, pricing, financialisaton, demand planning, and promo analytics. Firstly, promo creation. Some companies have a small number of products and carry out only occasional promotions, while large companies might need to manage many concurrent promotions with potentially high numbers of products in each. As such, I want to start by highlighting a few ways in which your promos can be entered.
We start here within this simplistic demo model, where the method is to use the manual buttons. First, create the promo by customer, fund type, and date range, selecting from the pre-existing choices. Next, add products to the promotion, including attributes, revised price, and uplift. There are also buttons here for making future manual adjustments and submitting for approval. Note that it would also be easy to add in a replication button that selects from historical promotions in a drop-down menu to reuse those as the foundation for a new promo, making it easy to replicate the same product groups and customer groups.
An alternative to the manual input is an upload from Excel. CSV files can be imported into Anaplan either on an automated schedule or by manually clicking a button, such as this. The file could contain all information related to a new promo or include overrides and adjustments for existing promotions. Again, this could be any attribute of the promo, including promo name, product range, pricing, start and end date, funding type, etc. A one-time load from Excel is an efficient method for initialising and maintaining large numbers of promos.
Once the data is into Anaplan, it can be represented in any way as required. This TPM model was developed to allow flexible management of the customers related to a promotion, as not every customer takes every line, and they may run the promotion at different times. Here we see grocery products that are part of a new promotion and a matrix of all of the customers. The user can manually check and uncheck the boxes for each line, adding the relevant start and end dates as appropriate and also add their own commentary. This, of course, could also be added to Anaplan as a mass load from a CSV file, for example.
As we roll that onto the next dashboard, we combine that information with the customer’s volume forecast to see a visualisation of their demand projection through the promotion. It considers the number of doors, i.e., how many stores are involved in the promotion, and we can clearly see the lines that are excluded.
Moving forward through this model, we show more detailed financial information with the headline key metrics, then broken out by category, and finally summarising all promos across the year. It’s keeping a record of the discount types that can roll into the finance model. We have off-license everyday low cost, supplier contribution, and in-store discounts. Note that the supplier contribution is recorded here within a promo but could also be measured within Anaplan outside of promotions, for example, to track supplier rebates.
On our final dashboard, we summarise the total spend by customer and then by the spend types to provide vital information to feedback to suppliers and help shape future promotions.
In this final TPM model, we have another dashboard for promo creation. This one allows for promos to be created and to be added and managed within promos and also adding additional spend types. Here we have some examples from the previous model, but remember that you can always configure your own within Anaplan.
Ensure promotions are created in Anaplan. This model also includes very useful analysis tools for measuring the levels of success for promos. The first is a return on the investment based upon the expected value and volume metrics. TPM is also about an understanding of the impact upon demand planning. Spikes in demand caused by promotions and price changes can cause significant growth in demand forecasts that result in increased inventory where cash and warehouse space is tied up, and obsolete stock can result. Retaining all promotional activity in Anaplan’s memory enables useful functionality for demand planning and the forecasting process.
Here we see the dashboard for outlier correction, where a demand planner can determine which demand spikes should be forecastable and which should be excluded. For this first item, we can see eight outliers, but when overlaying historical promos using this checkbox, we see five more points that the planner can review, for example, applying a reason code and here applying a manual override to the value.
In our related data dashboard, the in-memory storage allows for comparison of forecasts, including and excluding promotional activity, easily overlaying information of events such as holidays, new product launches, and even macro event data if available. For now, tables show a further evaluation of the impact of these events in terms of incremental volume and comparison across different forecast models.
Linking TPM to Anaplan’s wider integrated business planning of S&OP in financial planning creates synergies that result in real value-added. This then completes the TPM process. But remember that without Anaplan’s version creation and what-if scenario planning functionality, any number of variations of this process could be simulated and compared to estimate the best and worst-case scenarios and everything in between.
Anaplan can also be configured to meet your exacting processes, ensuring that all business-specific exceptional circumstances are covered. No tailoring of your process to conform to a constrained off-the-shelf system solution.
I hope you enjoyed this video on trade promotions management. If you would like any more information on this subject or what Anaplan can do for your business, then please do contact us, and we’ll be happy to help.
