Pain-free seasonal sales planning at Bayer Consumer Health

Annual Customer Planning season at Bayer Consumer Health could be a painful time, with hours spent on low-value data gathering. Moving the process to a Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) application on Anaplan has made the process faster, richly detailed, and more business-friendly. It’s also enabled precise analysis that supports better, more effective decisions.

Many businesses experience seasonal fluctuations, but not like Bayer Consumer Health North America. The maker of Claritin, Alka-Seltzer, and other remedies must plan for cold, flu, and allergy seasons. “We need to understand the products we need get to the public at the seasonal peak,” explains Lori Martucci, the company’s Digital Lead. Martucci and her colleagues call this complex sales planning challenge Annual Customer Planning.

For years, manual tasks made Annual Customer Planning even more complicated. “People were spending too much time gathering data from several systems before they could analyze it, make decisions, and get the product out the door,” she recalls. Rolling up data took hours, and implementing changes to plans could take a week. “It was cumbersome and time-consuming, and there was a lot of room for error. We needed to automate the process so people could analyze data and create scenarios in real time.”

Data-fueled scenario planning

“Scenario planning is huge in our industry because we have to understand the financial impact of changes,” she explains. “For example, if we were to change a sales figure or run out of product, how would that affect the bottom line?” Because they wanted to bring in data from multiple systems automatically for scenario planning, Martucci and her team chose Anaplan. The sales and operations planning (S&OP) solution they built for Annual Customer Planning leverages data from Bayer's Data Lake, integrated using Anaplan API/CloudWorks. The results of the team’s analysis feed back to Bayer’s global financial systems.

After Annual Customer Planning went live successfully, other Bayer Consumer Health teams decided to deploy Anaplan for several use cases ranging from brand planning to media budgeting and execution. About 250 people throughout Bayer Consumer Health in North America use the solutions regularly. (Bayer also uses Anaplan in its Crop Science business and in Corporate Controlling.)

Detailed, business-centric data views in less time

Today, the Bayer Consumer Health team uses Anaplan to create a customer profit and loss (P&L) report with rich detail. Brands and customers are linked in business-centric data views, with the assumptions and methodology behind the data readily available. “The P&L now goes down to the line items that we need to analyze, which supports better, faster decision-making and scenario planning,” Martucci explains. “With our old system it took several hours and a lot of manpower to change one figure, whereas now we go into Anaplan, change a sales number for a particular month, and it allocates the figures to the SKU level.”

The time savings are put to good use, she adds. “We were spending thousands of hours per year maintaining spreadsheets,” Martucci says. “Now, with Anaplan, we have more time to analyze the data instead of gather the data, which allows for better business decisions and better planning.”

Martucci and her colleagues estimate that Annual Customer Planning on Anaplan saves around 1,000 hours of manual data integration, consolidation, accruals, and other tasks annually. The solution also reduces the risk of errors and provides a superior user experience. And they’re only getting started.

“We have implemented about 15 projects, and we continue to grow,” Martucci notes. “As we complete a project, we begin enhancements to make the project better. What excites me about Anaplan is the ability to bring different departments and areas throughout the company together.”