Unfreezing Growth for a European Frozen Food company

The ‘FM’ in ‘FMCG’ means businesses in the sector must respond quickly to seize business opportunities. For a UK-headquartered European frozen food company with a large portfolio of brands, that’s a sizeable challenge. It operates across 22 European markets and constantly juggles large volumes of product and market data.

However, the company’s teams responsible for managing revenue lacked consistent and continuous access to timely data insights. Inevitably, this meant ad hoc decision-making and duplication of effort.

Consequently, it hindered optimal commercial decisions relating to key aspects of revenue management, including:

• Product pricing
  
• Product promotions
  
• Profit mix across its brands and packs
  
• Investment with retailers who sell its products

KPMG began supporting the company on a project to address the challenge that began in post-covid world. We identified three challenges to overcome:

• Getting everybody aligned on what they wanted in the ‘front end’ of an RGM solution.
• Agreeing a roadmap internally that could be aligned across multiple markets and brands.
• Aligning the entire group, cluster and market teams to create a ‘one-stop-shop’ RGM solution.

The client’s goal was to integrate a new RGM function into its operations and determine how to plug in higher-quality insights and planning into the company’s business process. The solution had to enable data analytics to be automatically provisioned with self-building analyses rather than having teams manually compile data in Excel. This would prevent the inefficient ‘cottage industry’ of spreadsheets where different people might get different results based on their individual data handling decisions.

A significant challenge was to migrate the reactive net revenue management team into an RGM team where dozens of staff would be using the tool daily and monthly.

The change meant evolving from a relatively data-light, short-term sales support function to stepping up the scope, professionalisation and capabilities of that function. KPMG’s solution had to work in a format acceptable to current SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) users.

We mapped out what the RGM team needed to achieve agreeing with the client:

• What resources were needed?
• What market processes were required?
• How to power those processes with data and analytics?

The firm then wrote out the processes and identified the supporting data and analyses needed to drive them within strategic and annual business planning activities. Based on this information, KPMG was able to scope out the recommended solution.

For this, the firm:

• Defined the company’s data requirements.
• Identified data sources and metrics.
• Developed Key Performance Indicators, calculations and parameters for the agreed technology solution.

For the solution, we created an end-to-end integrated tool featuring:

Strong project governance underpinned the project. Careful review discussions took place at key stages up to and during the pilot and rollout stages. Our overall approach was to ‘work backwards’, first by determining what inputs were required by users and then what outputs should be generated.

We worked closely with teams based in its largest markets, notably the UK, France, Germany and Italy, to create a strong understanding of the client’s requirements. This was applied across all of the company’s brands. The collaborative approach meant that we drew on significant market input to design the RGM tool.

In particular, the firm built a strong working relationship with the Data Office team. Gradually, reticence about sharing sensitive feedback evolved into a collaborative problem-solving effort. Both sides brainstormed solutions together in a classic ‘forming, storming, norming’ progression.

We ran initial training workshops for the RGM group and market super-users before the company used its own training resources to handle the bulk of the training workload. The firm also created extensive technical documentation for the work carried out in both GCP and SAC. We then ran multiple technical hand-over sessions to the company’s IT support team so they could successfully take on the support of the tool ‘in-house’.

We brought an objective perspective to the project thanks to its extensive experience working in the FMCG sector. The team also provided extensive expertise in building similar RGM tools in other sectors, including medical wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers.

The firm pulled in technical expertise from its Central SAP team in India and its Google Cloud team for technical support. Knowledge was pooled and tailored to meet the company’s RGM goal.