Case Study 1: Piloting Procter & Gamble From Decision Cockpits

Background

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is the largest manufacturer of consumer products in the world by market capitalization. With its successful brand of 300 types of consumer products from beauty care , household care and health & wellbeing care, its products like Pampers, Ariel, Gillette and Olay touched 4.4 billion people globally. And now P&G brands available in more than 180 countries. Its earned $82 billion in revenues in 2011.

P&G been established in 1837 and its headquarter in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its has 127,000 employees through out the supply chains globally. As the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company and “most admired companies” for its ability to create, market and its sell, they have a challenge in data management and responded for the best option or the best decision for the company.

P&G sustained and maintained its brand’s popularity by its unique business and IT innovation by collaboration between its researchers, marketeers and managers globally. Its business strategy must be ahead from its core competitor, Unilever of Britain. With a budget of 3.4% from its annual revenue on innovations and with its existing brands via through advertising and marketing strategy, P&G can maintain its competitive advantage and well ahead from its core competitor, Unilever.

The Challenges

To maintain and ahead from its competitors also expanding its businesses globally definitely, P&G facing a lot of challenges through its functional areas ie Human resource, Finance and Accounting, Manufacturing and Production and lastly its Sales and Marketing. Gathering data, preparation reports, and interprets data is a challenging issue for executives, brand managers neither its lower-level employees. Now, the only main reason for its success is through its robust information technology and its willingness to pursue in new IT innovations.

Q1. What management, organization and technology issues had to be addressed when implementing Business Sufficiency, Business Sphere and Decision Cockpits?

Business Sufficiency - The advantages

P&G Business Sufficiency is a analytic models where its able to respond rapidly to market share changes and uncover new opportunities to improve the lives of consumers.

By eliminating the delay of manually collecting and aggregating data, this business intelligence system improves productivity and collaboration, simplifies work processes, reduces the decision-making cycle time, and enables P&G to focus on innovating for the consumer :-

Business Sufficiency analytic models focus the business on exceptions and provide forward-looking projections and scenarios. This means its ability to predict the performance of P&G market share through its key performance matric by six months to one year into future.
This complex data is presented visually in business processes, allowing leaders to view the data more easily, process the information faster, and quickly turn insights into actions.
GBS Analysts use the technology to help bring context to the data and identify opportunities for P&G.
This network of analysts also helps the Company save time and money by reapplying lessons learned across categories, regions, and business units.
P&G business leaders around the globe see the same business data in the same way at the same time, allowing them to collaborate more effectively.
The system is already providing business value. One supply chain example leveraged supply chain Sufficiency models to bring together multiple data points, analytics, and visualizations. This resulted in an inventory reduction of 25% and savings of tens of millions of dollar.

“Getting beyond the what to the why and the how.”

Business Sphere - The advantages

P&G Business Sphere was built and powered by P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS) which able to visualize immersive data environment and transforms for decision-making with a real-time business information from around the globe.

GBS Business Sphere Technology :

The integrated technology between visualization and information enables leaders to drill-down into data to get answers in real-time.
To answer a set of questions, the program analyzes and connects as much as 200 terabytes of data allowing for unprecedented granularity and customization. The way the data is presented uncovers insights, trends, and opportunities for the business leaders and prompts them to ask different and very focused business questions. If one question elicits a follow-up question, if can be addressed with data on-the-spot.
The visualization helps people to “see” the data in ways they would not have been able to with just numbers and spreadsheets. It challenges assumptions while simultaneously presenting the data in different ways, revealing potential solutions that previously may have not been apparent.

Decision Cockpits - The advantages

With its 140,000 employees scattered in more then 80 countries, the management issues, organization and technology issues had to be addressed properly and fast.

To ease in decision making, P&G has created institutionalized data visualization as a primary tool of management. Working with visual analytics software vendor Tibco Spotfire, P&G has put visual displays of key information on desktops where over 50,000 P&G employees can access the “Decision Cockpit”

P&G used data visualization and commonality in translating its data into a common visual language to simplify in decision-making to solve their day to day problems. The ability to analyze this massive amount of data is critical to running the business in real-time and being responsive to changes in the marketplace.

Q2. How did these decision-making tools change the way the company ran its business? How effective are they? Why?

Its can process large amounts of data fast and efficiently then translating its data into a common visual language to simplify in decision-making to solve their day to day problems. P&G’s decision makers now focused on real and critical business challenges and able to respond the changes in the market places globally.

Q3. How are these systems related to P&G's business strategy?

With the implementation of this unique system, all P&G managers and its employees able to make a fast and better decisions. This systems reduced complexity involved in generating a statistical report, as well as cost reductions from maintaining one standardized set of data across the enterprise. But also with the systems more workers can answer their own questions and the ability to excess more information, the company as whole able to anticipate future events affecting the business and more quickly respond to market stimuli.

Conclusion

The ability to predict, to detect business trend and to find more opportunities though its IT, P&G able to be ahead from its competitors.

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