The challenge
Trade promotions are the deals a supplier runs with retailers, such as temporary price cuts. Kellogg's planned its trade promotions in spreadsheets it had built itself. They worked, but they could not keep up as the business grew. They did not update as new data came in, and they did not give planners the information they needed to plan promotions well. The manual approach had started to hold back growth and efficiency, and the business needed one connected system instead.
What was delivered
This was a discovery program, and our team was involved in delivering it. Discovery means working sessions to understand in detail how the business runs today. The sessions with Kellogg's mapped how its operations worked, and the program then assessed whether a trade promotion management system was feasible.
The planned system would replace the spreadsheets, give the business reliable data and offer one place to plan promotions and handle the work around them. The output was a blueprint for that system and a plan for the steps that would follow.
What it included
- Discovery sessions on how promotions are planned today
- Gaps and inefficiencies in the current process identified
- Feasibility assessment of a trade promotion management system
- A blueprint for rolling the system out
Results
The work found the gaps and inefficiencies in the existing planning process and produced a blueprint for rolling out a trade promotion management system. Kellogg's finished with a clearer picture of how to plan promotions from data, and a set of simplified strategies ready for the next phases of implementation. This was a discovery engagement. It ended with the blueprint and did not include building the system.
Why it matters
Choosing or building software before you know what it must do often means paying to fix it later. The Kellogg's work spent four months working out what a replacement system had to do before anyone chose or built one. That matches the Map and Route stages of how we work.
