With the increased use of data, businesses are on the path to becoming data-driven organizations today. Enabling the employees with the right data at a right time can help the business make intelligent and informed decisions. And at the same time, gives the business a competitive edge.Kellogg India has been trying to mine the data that it already has and is trying to leverage it to fuel growth.
“Over the past few years, data has become the fuel that we have conceived a vision around. Our vision was brought to life with ‘Project Pulse’. It was conceived to put Kellogg India on its journey towards becoming a data-driven Organization. The path was to create and enable meaningful and actionable data access as well as usage at all layers of the organization to enable clarity & empowerment,” said Asfar Khan, Director – IT, Kellogg South Asia.
Kellogg India started simply by evaluating the vast amount of data which also came from a considerable number of sources. It made a central repository home (DataLake) to store all this data for further classification. Since this was not flexible and satisfactory enough, the company created a modelling layer on it using advanced technologies of HIVE & HADOOP. Finally, to fill the remaining gaps, Kellogg India created a flexible and fun interface around it using Power BI tools.
“The outcome has brought about a cultural change in us – data became cleaner, clearer and this converted into more informed actionable,” he added.
The food manufacturing company has moved from Descriptive Analytics and has started working on Predictive Analytics through three business cases, which are – Segmented Selling (Predict Must Sell/Cross Sell/Focus brand/New launch volumes/OOS & Integrates with seller’s SFA), Trade Promo Analytics (Perform post event Analytics) for the schemes & has key impact of the schemes on Distribution/VPO/ROI/Assortment, and Micro-Growth Opportunities (identifying opportunities for growth clustering towns).
With such extensive use of analytics, Kellogg India has moved from looking at Data and talking about the past to now looking at data and talking about its impact in the future.
“Data sources can act like a double edged sword and trap us in data paralysis if not used skilfully. With Project Pulse, we now have all the data available to us under a single smart platform systematically designed to follow a marketer’s logical thought wave. As a result of this we have been able to speed up our decision making process and take swift actions backed by data.” Khan said.
According to Khan, data has largely empowered the company’s marketing team who are also one of the biggest consumers of data within the organisation. Data across markers like media spends, brand health and offtake numbers becomes easy to analyse since they are all plotted together.
“For example, this tells us immediately how an increased spend in media is influencing the brands mind measures and impacting shares. Data can be quantified and segmented at the root level, simplifying the entire marketing process. On top of this, having access to actionable data which is channel agnostic reduces downtimes and ensures minimum wastage of human and capital resources. Moreover, the quality of the final forecast increases when you can identify the latent structure in data, helping us look into the future and plan accordingly,” Khan explained.
On the qualitative front, Kellogg India’s entire technological setup has been upgraded to support the advancement in internal data and analytics. The modules provide a deep dive across KPIs. The process has now shifted from creating the entire report to just downloading it with the click of a button.
“Even the structure in which the dashboards are put and the way the key points are segregated and highlighted gives us more time to take actions. Data access has become seamless and we’ve been able to integrate data sources which otherwise requires a lot of time and effort. The time and effort that earlier went into planning without improved data generation can now be used for smarter decision making and more agile information creation,” he concluded.
