Business intelligence for consumer goods businesses

Consumer goods businesses typically have a large variety of products and a high turnover rate. With an abundance of fast moving stock, how can you use data to your advantage?

Changes to the consumer goods and FMCG industry

Country singer Marty Stuart once famously sang, “There’s too much month at the end of my money.” Fortunately, economic times have changed. Today, we enjoy more disposable income than ever before. Consequently, we are able to purchase the things we want rather than limiting ourselves to just meeting our most basic needs.

However, an increase in product consumption leads to new competitors entering the marketplace. To remain competitive, retailers and distributors must meet and exceed their customers’ expectations, or their customers will find a retailer or distributor who does. Business intelligence (BI) software provides consumer goods businesses with the ability to analyze trends, make accurate forecasts, fine tune your marketing campaigns, and maintain appropriate stock levels. This way, a consumer goods business that uses BI is more likely to thrive than one who does not use BI.

How consumer goods businesses can gain an advantage over competitors

As the rate at which consumer goods are sold has changed, so to has the way they are sold. Every business today produces a large volume of data relating to sales, inventory, purchasing and more. Businesses that simply sit on this data without leveraging it risk losing out to competitors who are using their data to make smarter business decisions.

By analyzing business data, consumer goods businesses are able to:

• Identify sales opportunities
• Better control stock levels in relation to changing demand
• Improve the way they sell to improve margins
• Get a better insight into business trends you did not know existed, and much more.

However, analysing this data straight from an ERP or other data source costs time and requires support from IT. Moreover, if you have data in multiple sources, such as ERPs, CRMs and spreadsheets, you may have to report from each source individually, and combine the data in spreadsheets. This costs time, and leaves room for errors that are difficult to identify, but can have a large impact on the way you understand what is happening within your business.

Business intelligence for consumer goods businesses

Through investing in a business intelligence (BI) solution, consumer goods businesses can get the most out of their business data, in a fraction of the time it would take to report directly from a data source. Because consumer goods businesses often have fast-moving stock, business intelligence like Phocas is ideal as it presents the end-user with up to date data, on any device. This way you are always exploring current data and seeing current trends, even on the go.

Phocas has years of experience working with manufacturers, retailers and wholesale distributors of consumer goods. Therefore, Phocas is designed to cater to the analysis needs of these businesses, and help your business discover new opportunities for increased revenue and decreased costs.

Would you like to learn more about which KPIs and metrics your consumer goods business can measure for optimal business benefits? Click on the button below, to download your copy of our consumer goods eBook.