Serving the Promotional Pack Planning Market with Speed and Agility

It is common in today’s workplace for business activities to require expertise from a number of angles such as sales, marketing, product, supply, finance, legal. Slow inefficient working can all too easily result in these cases from siloed working which duplicates information for it to quickly get out of sync with everyone else. Desktop applications such as Excel can drive this ‘personal copy’ mentality because they are single-user tools.

We illustrate how Anaplan is about providing a tailored, flexible desktop look-and-feel on an enterprise environment. This means seeing the angle on the data you need to see for your role, whilst the live data, structure and workflow status come from a common source. This collaboration step change was one we were able to realize for a large Consumer Goods company who had these challenges and more in their special promotional packs business.

Special promotional packs are an effective way to encourage consumers to shake up their current buying habits and experience new products. Bundling products together in a competitively priced package rewards the consumer for taking a risk with something new and offers a novelty experience. Achieving success for the pack provider requires good disciplined planning and execution: reviewing the profitability of possible pack combinations; alignment with internal and customer marketing objectives and retailer commitments; checking on supply availability; delivering into the narrow time window of opportunity. So managing the process comes with many challenges.

This is different from the already considerable challenges of Sales and Operations Planning because of the fluid nature of the activity and the need for creativity. It is connected planning within a framework designed to bend where needed but be firm elsewhere, allowing the power of automation to kick in and make communication clearer and enforce consistency.

Watch this recorded webcast to see how the collaboration capabilities of Anaplan’s cloud-based planning software can really help with this challenge.

We show how it:

• Supports operational planning and execution for all players: using a central dimensional Anaplan model accessible to all
• Enables an iterative pack design journey: tracking variations to the original pack design as it is refined to meet the many requirements and hit the optimal trade-off
• Controls the process: handling workflow and approval processes to maintain disciplines from start to finish, and showing status along the way
• Simplifies pack design: allowing planners to construct their Bill of Materials from a centrally sourced portfolio, from a high-level customer shaped design down to full detail
• Streamlines profitability calculations: using likely retailer demand to calculate expected pack profitability and enabling easy pack swaps to ensure the best combination is selected

Is it for you?

• Are you looking for a flexible tool to help your promotional pack planning without the heavy IT overhead?
• Have you reached the limits of Excel and want to scale-up to a more robust and controlled environment?
• Do you want to enable your business users to analyze promotions and make data-driven decisions?
  Is your organization in need of more collaborative planning?
• Does your organization use Anaplan already allowing you to leverage this investment further?