Success Story
Improve Commercial Strategy by Leveraging Advanced Analytics of Sales Data Provided by Market Data Integrator
Pharmaceutical, Animal Health
Region
Global
Company Profile
Our Client, one of the leading international Animal Health companies, is a member of CEESA (non profit international organization) and a participant of CEESA International Sales Survey. There are dedicated resources in Client’s headquarters and colleagues all around the world who support the quarterly data submission process as well as produce insights from CEESA published market share data.
Challenge
Central reporting on CEESA Market share is very limited. Most of Client’s top countries have dedicated resources to provide meaningful insights from this data. To enable multidimensional analysis some countries make simple attempts of estimating competitor’s turnover, but all attempts fail to meet all available criteria leading to inconsistencies in estimates and then to unreliable insights. An effort to prepare these insights globally, estimated to the level of 72 man-weeks, was producing unreliable results with contradictions, which undermined trust to the insights and their adoption.
Data submission process is very distributed, manual and erratic. Client’s colleagues around the world are involved in collecting sales reports, applying species splits, mapping products to CEESA product categories. Manual and geographically distributed process is lengthy and prone to errors, making the quarterly deadline for CISS (CEESA International Sales Survey) data submission very tough to meet.
Key Benefits
99%
Faster Analytical Insights
100%
Turnover Estimations Match Estimation Constrains
75%
Time-Wise Improvement (from 4 weeks to 1 week)
83%
Labor Cost Savings (from 12 man-weeks to 2 man-days)
Kamil Mróz, C&F | DevOps Engineer
Our Approach
Assessment
C&F supplied a team of 2 business analysts who through the series of interviews and reverse engineering assessed and documented processes used, and identified their bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
Business Alignment
These analysts have further worked with client's business colleagues to prepare common Information Model Architecture that unified data definitions used and allowed aligning decisions of sales data sourcing, product hierarchy used and species dictionary. This exercise also laid ground for a new analytics data model. Process Engineering phase allowed our analysts to propose adjustments to the processes of producing data insights and sales data submission. New processes were agreed with business and resulting client's organizational structures adjustments were agreed.
Implementing Solutions
One of the original analysts was tasked with orchestrating new processes. Steps of the new processes that could be automated were described in functional requirements specification for an IT system and SLA for the automated steps were provided. This vision was then aligned with IT. Client's IT provided architecture and infrastructure guidelines and selected solutions vendor (also C&F) for system development facilitating most of the steps of the new processes. One of the original analysts was overseeing system engineering and deployment and documented operating procedures for process owners, data stewards and support.
CEESA Data Processing And Reporting – Fully Automated Process
Collect data from CEESA: export Sales Rankings files with all related information (therapeutic classes, species definitions, products definitions, etc.) provided by CEESA and import acquired data to an internal data storage
Merge new and historical data: transform data to appropriate format allowing for sales estimation process, merge previously loaded information with recently loaded data
Estimate competitor sales values using CEESA data as the inputs, such as: list of products, own sales values, sales rankings, product allocations to controlled groups, etc.
Sales Data Reports: visualize estimated Sales Data in predefined set of reports and dashboards, provide ad-hoc reporting capability allowing for own analysis
Sales Data Preparation
For CISS Submission
Consolidate sales data: from multiple different corporate units or systems, provided in different formats (databases, files, interfaces, etc.)
Transform sales data: into submission file supporting CEESA format
Products matching: support with matching CEESA codes and internal SKUs, manage products mapping dictionary
Data validation: support in CEESA submission file validation and approval
Deliver Sales Data to CEESA system in required format, quarterly
Outcome
-
Implemented automated process limited the effort required to produce analytical insights by 99,97% – from 72 man-weeks globally to 1 man-hour verification in HQ
-
Insights Time to Market was accelerated by 3 weeks – from average of 3 weeks to exactly 1 business day after CISS quarterly report becomes available
-
Turnover estimations were proven to match 100% estimation constrains. 2 merger/acquisitions that happened after the implementation of a new process had proven extremely high accuracy of turnover estimations. (Forecast error figure is protected by client confidentiality)
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Implemented semi-automated data preparation and submission process improved time-wise by 75% – from 4 weeks to 1 week and effort-wise by 93,33% – from 12 man-weeks to 2 man-days on the client side and 2 man-days of an outsourced data operation
