How Kellogg’s Eliminated Manual Data Searching to Advance Their Sales Analysis

This Tibersoft case study outlines how Kellogg’s has traded manual data scrubbing for automated data management and easily accessed analytics.

BACKGROUND

The century-old company created breakfast cereal and built an industry on the foundation of K.W. Kellogg’s belief in nutrition. In 2013, Kellogg’s began analyzing Same Store Sales to understand changes in National Account Measurements. The Sales Analysis team would spend 40 hours each week putting the raw rebate files in Access manually and analyzing the data in this raw form. Kellogg’s needed a system to automate this process and make it more time efficient.

CHALLENGES

The Sales Analysis team was tasked with scrubbing all available data for insights that would explain Same Store Sales changes. The non-commercial bill-back data was housed outside of Tibersoft and was time consuming for Kellogg’s to scrub, upload to Access, and analyze.

The time-consuming analysis happened once every quarter, creating a data lag. If something occurred early on in the quarter, it would remain unaddressed until the report was filed months later. The Sales team began requesting more frequent reports, lists, and metrics. However, analysts were manually unable to provide the information.

In 2016, Kellogg’s began loading account rebate and admin fee data into the Tibersoft tool, which removed the need for sales pivots. The Tibersoft Claims tab lacked the additional fields and conversions needed to reduce the manual data scrubbing.

SOLUTIONS

Kellogg’s worked with Tibersoft to develop a custom tab for National Account data that tied with the existing sales pivots the teams had been using. Mastered data in the National Accounts tab allowed the Analyst to view and analyze all data without having to load raw data into Access.

In June of 2019, Tibersoft revamped its Operator Review module, and introduced a series of advanced analytics. The system identifies and remediates duplicates and errors as it moves through processing.

This transformed the national, distributor, DC, and operator analytics. Analysts are now able to focus on the business interpretation of the data to produce business reviews rather than concern themselves with the mechanics or the implication of inaccuracy inherent in manual processes.

I’ve become much more sophisticated in my analytics and I feel that I’ve become a much more valuable resource to Sales strategy, Sales, and the other teams within our organization.

 

FORMER SENIOR MANAGER OF SALES, TRADE AND STRATEGY AT KELLOGG’S.

RESULTS

Tibersoft reduced the time to complete the Same Store Sales analysis each quarter by 32 hours. Analysts no longer spend time scrubbing data and instead are able to focus their time on producing valuable insights with the data Tibersoft provides.

The rich data, capable of explaining business ups, downs and the status quo in Explore, earned Kellogg’s the recognition by many of the biggest National Accounts as providing best-in-class-reviews.

The processing of rebate data is now as frequent as the submission of data and sales teams are able to pivot and remain aligned with current data trends. All of the Kellogg’s teams are able to forecast, innovate, build, and plan more accurately with the information easily accessed through Tibersoft.