Why Choose a CPG Analytics Platform over a DIY Analytics Implementation?
Data-driven decision making is as instrumental to your brand’s success as the manufacturing process and machinery that makes your products. When it comes to data analysis, some companies try to implement home-built analytics systems on their own rather than choosing to integrate a CPG analytics platform. While this decision may suffice initially, there are long-term challenges with a jerry-rigged, DIY version.
It’s not a simple undertaking to design, architect, code, implement, scale, and maintain a data analytics platform alongside the core business of manufacturing, marketing, and selling consumer goods. The basics of combining a database with a charting library just won’t cut it.
A DIY approach often doesn’t account for the true costs of the ownership, maintenance, and labor it requires to fully utilize the amount of sales data available. While it may be a fix or an answer for an immediate need, a DIY analytics solution is rarely prepared for the future.
A CPG Analytics platform should not be a do-it-yourself project. You trust the professionals to make your machines, you should lean on professionals to help better understand your data as well.
Here are a few things to consider before choosing a DIY Analytics Implementation:
The Resources Needed
Big data is often at the mercy of the three V’s: volume, variety, and velocity. The amount of data and storage that’s required, paired with the constant maintenance of a technology stack is too big a task to build and manage alone.
Data alone is not enough. If it was, you would just have to send your retail buyers an Excel topline. Fragmented data sets require more specialized data harmonization than what a DIY approach can offer. It needs to capture trends and gain insights to tell the ‘why’ behind the data.
A DIY approach also struggles to harmonize standalone datasets in a singular point of view for all departments, not just analysts and category managers. Giving sales, marketing and leadership teams the same master set improves accuracy and consistency, and offers a huge competitive advantage. It takes time, resources, and budget dollars for a DIY project to harmonize the data at a high level and present it in a user-friendly interface.
Knowledge Gaps
The business value and benefits of any analytics implementation highly depend on the team tasked with managing and analyzing the data. Consultants or IT departments aren’t trained in knowing what CPG sales teams need when sitting in front of a retail buyer. They also aren’t familiar with knowing which visualization is best for each sales story or have the domain expertise to deal with the tough reality of convincing a retail buyer to keep you on shelves when your sales are declining.
Sales teams on the other hand have other responsibilities and tasks to get done aside from picking apart the data sets, so they tend to view the data from a myopic vantage point. Saving your sales and analyst teams countless hours and manual labor allows them to actually spend time understanding and working with the data.
A tight labor market is impacting a company’s ability to hire necessary analytical talent, so many turn to a trusted partner to provide their more limited analytics teams with much-needed bandwidth by making automatable data and insights accessible to more. You leave a lasting impression as “the partner that does more than they talk” because you can deliver the category-leading insights they need to see.
Design Challenges that Lack Professionalism
CPGs want a simple and intuitive design with an easy-to-read user interface that they can navigate seamlessly. Sales teams now expect their enterprise software to be as engaging as their consumer applications (think Netflix, Robinhood, TikTok, or Instagram). A DIY or homemade approach is only “boardroom ready”, and likely to be an aesthetically ‘clunky’ Excel sheet with broken links and data that isn’t harmonized.
With Bedrock, our Storyboards help you turn your data into compelling sales stories, which can be exported directly into your own branded and customizable template. Our platform instantly and automatically turns your data into easily digestible visualizations that will leave a lasting impression on viewers. You’ve put your heart and soul into growing your brand and your products, your presentations should reflect that as well.
Your design may be best-in-class when it’s created, but will it stand the test of time in 2 years? 4? 8? The design architecture might be built for the organization that it is today, but it may be built with constraints that make it unscalable for the long haul.
The Value — Was it Worth It?
If you don’t have the institutional knowledge from business experts who have been on the CPG front lines, you’re putting the business at risk. Managing and fully utilizing all of your CPG sales data is hard to do alone because too much time is spent in analysis.
Do you want to spend your valuable time building the right model, training your team, requesting reports, tracking down bugs in the architecture, and dealing with file size for your end user?
Or, do you want to rely on a retail analytics partner that is battle ready and has insider knowledge of what certain buyers or retailers want or expect to see from CPG’s sales presentations? Leave a lasting impression of your product over competitors and let Bedrock do the heavy lifting, getting your analytics implementation up and running in weeks.
Did you know: Bedrock re-platforms every two years to leverage the latest technology for better rendering speed, more data transfer, and improved extendibility to connect back to other data sources?
Here’s an example of how much it would cost you to try to recreate just some of our capabilities:
Bedrock users report over 75% reduction in time needed for data analysis and a 10X ROI within the first 6 months of using our CPG data analytics and AI platform.
Bedrock Analytics uses AI algorithms to gather, process and analyze data that come from a variety of sources, such as points of sales data, Syndicated Data Aggregators (including Nielsen, IRI, or SPINS), Retail Store portals, e-commerce databases, consumer panel data sets, and more. In the input, Big Data are gigantic arrays of information. In the output – a content-rich analytical extract that would take teams much longer to do in any other way.
We’ve been in your shoes and are here to help. Your analytical support team grows overnight once you sign up with Bedrock. You can ask us questions like:
- Can you help me prepare for my board meeting?
- Can you help me put together some slides for my retailer review?
- I am trying to solve X, how might I do that using Bedrock?
- What is the calculation of this specific metric?
- What are some best practices?
Bedrock is more storytelling than statistics. It is a set of tools that helps brands find an optimal way to customers. Reduce complexity, optimize costs, and get your sales team out of analysis and back to what they do best—focusing on the strategy and insights rather than pulling data and organizing slides and reports. Get in touch today to see how!
