Fresh data feeds healthy trade promotions at Kemps

Don’t let the laid-back image of cows in green pastures fool you: The dairy business is fiercely competitive. To encourage consumers to choose its products, Minnesota-based dairy co-op Kemps spends millions every year on trade promotions. Trade promotion management (TPM) at Kemps is a collaborative process with many stakeholders, explains Senior Trade Analyst Stephanie Beebe. “If it doesn’t work for us, it’s not going to work for our retail partners,” she says.  

For more than 17 years, TPM at Kemps relied on manual processes and proprietary software. In late 2017, the Kemps team invited Anaplan to provide a demo, and the Anaplan team spent an evening building a working model of a solution tailored to Kemps’ needs.

“We all said, ‘Holy cow, you made this overnight?’” recalls Senior Director of Trade Marketing Tom Whittier. “Normally we’d expect it to take weeks if not months to create a system like this.” The deal was sealed and Kemps’ TPM solution on Anaplan went into production three weeks ahead of schedule.

Simplified interfaces, more automation

The new TPM solution streamlined the old software’s 10+ interfaces into three: A promotion dashboard where data is entered, a deduction processing dashboard where promotions are reconciled by SKU, seller, and other dimensions; and a spend report that shows promotional spending, trade promotion accruals, and return on promotions. The primary data inputs are sales data and deductions from Kemps’ ERP. Processed, cleared deductions are exported back to the ERP.

The solution transformed the way the trade planning team approaches its work. Previously, measuring promotion ROI was static and manual: The team exported data, processed it, created graphs and charts, and then reviewed the information. With Anaplan, data tasks are automated and integrated, and the team can analyze promotional performance in near-real time. “We can see what works and what doesn’t and make changes right away rather than waiting until the end of the month,” Beebe explains.

Over time, some of Kemps’ dashboards have been customized to provide customer- or retailer-specific data. “One trade analyst handles our single biggest customer,” Beebe, explains, “so we created a dashboard where she can get her data immediately, rather than filtering and updating reports.”

Improving collaboration, saving time and money

The new capabilities have changed the trade promotions team’s relationship with sales. For the first few years after implementing Anaplan, the two teams met monthly to comb through data, looking for ways to maximize ROI. That alone was transformative, but the process has improved further. “Through years of fast data and positive results, we have honed our system,” Beebe explains. “Now the meetings are quarterly instead of monthly because we have so much more confidence in our data, systems, and processes.”

Kemps’ retail partners also benefit from the company’s TPM solution. “Retailers always want to know about the success of promotions, and with Anaplan we can provide that information within a week,” Whittier says. “Then we can decide collaboratively what’s best for them and us together, which we believe gives Kemps a competitive advantage.”

“We spend less time allocating deductions, and more time analyzing the data,” Beebe agrees. “We’ve caught hundreds of thousands of dollars of erroneous deductions, and we’ve caught contract errors before they got out of hand. Being able to remedy these things quickly lets us stay ahead of future problems.”

The next step in Kemps’ Anaplan journey is extending the trade promotion system to a division its parent organization, Dairy Farmers of America. “The DFA ice cream folks have the same sort of data as us, but different systems, so I’m learning their data flows, telling them our story, and getting their buy-in,” Beebe says. “Seeing this next step forward is really validating.”