TPE history
Booz & Company has an extensive and prestigious history helping its clients transform their trade promotion capabilities. We pioneered the use of predictive modeling and analytics for improving trade promotion effectiveness in the mid-1980s when personal computers were becoming readily available to the field sales force.
Client Experience
Over the past 20 years, we have helped many consumer product companies transform their trade promotion strategies and capabilities. At any given time, we are usually assisting one or two clients with a major trade program.
Our clients have been diverse in size, product focus, and needs. – This diversity of experience has given us a broad perspective on Trade Promotion Excellence (TPE) which helps us better advise our clients. Our clients have included many of the largest and most respected companies in the industry – several with over $1B in annual trade spending – as well as many established but more focused CPG companies that have trade budgets of a few hundred million dollars per year. We have served clients in all major FMCG segments including food, beverage, consumer healthcare, and household non-durables. Our clients’ needs have been equally diverse (see Engagement Models).
Technology Experience
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the software market for Trade Promotion Management (TPM) systems was very immature. For many years, there were no analytical TPM systems commercially available. During this period, we developed several custom analytical TPM systems and the supporting predictive models for our pioneering clients. While these custom systems have long since been replaced by modern systems, the basic design concepts have endured and are still considered best practice.
The TPM software market has matured substantially and there are now several enterprise-caliber TPM software packages commercially available. The major solutions are provided by CAS, SAP and Oracle (via their Siebel and Demantra acquisitions). These solutions require substantial design, configuration and integration effort, which are services we often provide for our clients. Our implementation at The J&J Consumer Companies was recognized by Consumer Goods Technology as the Best TPM Implementation in 2006.
We recognize that technology is an important part of most trade transformation programs. We have worked closely with the major TPM software providers over time to help advance our clients’ agendas and to keep current our knowledge of the solutions in this space. However, unlike many of our competitors, we strictly maintain our independence from solution providers.
An Expert Team
Booz & Company maintains a dedicated team focused on Trade Promotion Excellence. We believe this is essential to providing the highest level of service to clients. It is the most effective way we have found to develop our skills, serve our clients, and advance our thinking in this space.
Throughout our history, we have experienced very little attrition, which has put us in the enviable position of having a very experienced team in a space where experience truly matters. The senior members of our TPE team have been with Booz & Company for anywhere from 10 to 40 years and each has personally been involved in 3-10 major trade programs (see Partner Bios). Our core TPE team includes dedicated strategists, program managers, business analysts, architects, developers, and change specialists –many of whom have over 8 years of experience working as part of our TPE team.
Our Intellectual Capital
Our consistent focus on TPE as a practice has given us an opportunity to develop an extensive repository of intellectual capital, which is essential to delivering results with speed, precision, and certainty. Our intellectual capital includes over 2,000 pages of unique content and covers a wide range of topics such as best practices, benchmarks, process maps, organizational designs, analytical models, system designs, business cases, and cost estimation tools.
Delivering Results
Booz & Company has repeatedly shown that we can deliver the transformations needed to bring enduring improvements to our clients’ trade promotion effectiveness. It is not unusual for our CPG clients to realize a 5–20% improvement in annual profits within one to two years of program launch. These results can be tangibly measured as either increases in revenue or decreases in trade spending. Our clients often realize secondary benefits as well, such as modernizing aging systems, providing more control over spending, or improving business intelligence. Our experience indicates that transformations based on an integration of strategic processes, organization, analytics, systems and data, and the right leadership yield the greatest results (see Capabilities).