Unlock critical data with trade promotion management

Kreena Mehta:
Consumer goods companies are being forced to look at their P and L with a new lens. The increased cost of raw materials and supply chain challenges are creating a need for CG companies to reevaluate their pricing model and, therefore, their promotional model. As the cost of goods sold rise, naturally other cost on the P&L must shrink. After the cost of goods sold, trade spent is the second largest line item on the PNL. This leaves companies asking how can we more effectively manage trade spend to ensure we are seeing a significant ROI on our investment. Let's take a deeper look at what's happening.
CG companies surveyed shared that their top roadblocks to effective trade effectiveness include not having visibility into promotion effectiveness, not being able to pinpoint the ROI, and their lack of data. Implementing a TPM system is the first step to tracking and monitoring trade effectiveness, but it goes beyond that. TPM systems must be fully integrated across CG companies ecosystems to efficiently solve for all of these roadblocks. In this demo. Let's see how you can nurture more robust relationships with optimal trade tactics and connected data with MuleSoft and Salesforce.

As a key account manager, I begin my day on the homepage of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud, where I have access to key dashboards that provide a holistic view of my accounts, their health, and how I'm tracking my plan. Right away, I can see that something is wrong. My manager has sent me a note saying that on the latest estimates show that we are not tracking to meet our year-end target. In addition, I can see that the dashboard is blinking red. I navigate to my trade calendar. Here, I can see a full view into all of the planning activities at my customer, and in here, I can see specific to this snack category. This data has been integrated from our ERP system leveraging MuleSoft's Accelerator for Consumer Goods, which is designed to enable our IT team to quickly integrate the TPM system with critical systems like ERP, MDM, and product information management or PNL systems in one place.

It looks like I have space to run an additional promotional event in October to get back on track. I can also click the PNL view button to see all my relevant planning KPIs for the category in one place. I need to plan against KPIs like pace volume, incremental volume, and the total volume, which has also been integrated from our E R P system and intelligently predicted by Einstein. MuleSoft power CG cloud with this real-time data from our ERP. But from my point of view, as a key account manager, I'm just happy that it's all here.

Salesforce TPM supports planning down to the product level. So if I wanna see gaps by product I can open up my filter. There is no need to worry about product synchronization with my ERP or even my product information management system. This has all been taken care of by IT using MuleSoft. As we saw earlier, I have a gap in October that is impacting my volume. I want to create a promotion to help. Here I can see high-level KPIs like ROI, profit, and volume. This looks like the promotion I want to run. So I click it and copy it to run the promotion.

I click my promotion library to see if I can find one that has performed well in the past and I can reuse. Here I can drill down by attributes such as retailer, week, and tactic type to find a promotion. I click the particular retailer to see promotions we have run specific to them in the past. The promotion in the top right stands out, so I click the dot on the graph. Here I can filter the dashboard and see details specific to this promotion for post-event analysis. This is based on historical data from other systems that are integrated thanks to MuleSoft. I wanna see if there is a successful promotion that I ran earlier in the year that I might be able to copy. After opening the record, I'm brought to my new promotion. Here I can decide which products to include in this promotion, what my uplift will be from running this promo and explore the tactics that I can use to achieve my uplift.

In my volume planning card I can see the product level details like product core, data description, base price, et cetera. Once again, MuleSoft enables this data integration to be reflected from our ERP without ever needing to leave CG Cloud. After I finish planning this promotion, I want to get a quick pulse on the health of my business. I click over to checkbook to see how I'm tracking with my budgets. If I want to see real-time performance of my promotions with actuals, I can click over to my customer report tab. Here I have a full view of all my relevant customer KPIs versus my plan. As we all know, it can be very hard to have a single source of growth for this data.

Since we leveraged MuleSoft, we were able to get data flowing between our demand planning systems and rest of our businesses to synchronize real-time reporting and planning. Beyond trade, there is a lot of activity that I can conduct on behalf of audit collaboration with my customer. To track or view that activity I can come into their customer page, where I can see all the relevant information across the entire organization related to that customer. Once again, this is powered by integration. No one needs to manually pull this customer data in. And as a key account manager, I'm very happy that my team is able to spend time analyzing the customer insights and optimizing future plans. As we just saw, I was able to effectively plan my promotion without leaving CG cloud, even when I needed product, account, pricing, baseline, and condition data, which is maintained in our ERP and MDM systems.

Let's take a quick look under the hood to see how MuleSoft helped to block all of these critical data sets by cutting down silos between different systems. CG companies' IT team can quickly connect their ERP, PIN, and MDM systems using pre-built assets from MuleSoft Accelerator for Consumer Goods. It comes with production-ready, APIs, data mapping, and integration templates that are built to increase time to value saving weeks of development time. Not only that, MuleSoft also offers IT teams with reference architectures and detailed documentation to adopt best practices that enable you to scale quickly. For demo purposes, I have already downloaded an implementation template for CG Cloud system API. Let's hop over to Anypoint studio to see this template in action.

Each accelerator asset comes with detailed API specifications and reference implementation templates that contain end to end flows, which are developed and tested against standard systems. And it can be further extended and customized to suit your unique means. In addition to these flows, implement templates are bundled with end unit tests and error handling capabilities. Each of these interfaces are built with API best practices that enable you to effectively scale your architecture for your future needs. Let's take a look at Salesforce CG Cloud system API that provides you with endpoints to connect to Salesforce CG Cloud to get, post, and patch critical data for trade promotion management. I flip into one of these endpoints for products. Here you can find end-to-end flows that are developed and tested to retrieve product and hierarchy data from Salesforce CG loud, as well as create or update new and existing products respectively.

Beneath these flows, you can also find data mapping that allows you to stransform data into the required data model for your source and destination systems. Lastly, we have also built the logic that will help you award duplication of objects in CG Cloud to ensure the sanity of data that you will need to plan promotions effectively. Our goal is to enable consumer good companies to more effectively manage their trade spend. We do this by empowering IT teams to launch necessary integrations 3x times faster, enabling key account managers and finance teams to be better equipped to plan and monitor data-driven promotions.