To maintain its global leadership position, P&G must constantly monitor market trends, respond quickly to them, and seek out new opportunities to improve the lives of its consumers. The ability to analyze this massive amount of data is critical to running a real-time business. It also helps to be adaptable to changes in the marketplace.
P&G’s Ex-CEO Bob McDonald outlined a plan to “digitize” the company’s processes from beginning to end in order to make data easily accessible to decision-makers. The primary enablers of that agenda were Business Sufficiency, Business Sphere, and Decision Cockpit
In this post, you’ll learn how a business company called P&G uses Data Visualization to uncover New Opportunities for Growth. If you’re looking for a Data Visualization Tool, we suggest using fusioncharts for data visualization.
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Business Sufficiency Models to Focus on Exceptions and Provide Forward-Looking Projections and Scenarios
According to an article published in InformationWeek, “the Business Sufficiency program, gave executives predictions about P&G market share and other performance stats six to 12 months into the future. At its core is a series of analytic models designed to reveal what’s happening in the business now, why it’s happening, and what actions P&G can take.”
Fig: The heat map simultaneously shows all the markets in which P&G products compete and their relative share (red indicating low market share and green indicating high market share), and also puts in clear perspective the importance of growing the share of any one of those markets. Source: blogs.hbr.org
The “what” models focus on data such as shipments, sales, and market share. The “why” models highlight sales data down to the country, territory, product line, and store levels. Also, these models have drivers such as advertising and consumer consumption, factoring in the region- and country-specific economic data. The “actions” analyses look at levers P&G can pull, such as pricing, advertising, and product mix, and provide estimates on what they deliver.
“All these models have three things in common. First, they focus on exceptions, what’s doing better and worse than expected, so P&G executives can learn what’s working and copy it, while heading off the flops. Second, the models are all predictive, and delivered through dashboards, charts, and supplemental analytics served up through data visualization and analysis software. The predictions are continually refined toward the end of each quarter. Third, they show a range of possible outcomes, allowing for what-if scenario planning.”
This complex data is presented visually in business processes, allowing decision-makers to view the data more efficiently. Also, it facilitates faster information processing and quickly turns insights into actions. Decision-makers around the globe see the same business data in the same way at the same time. Furthermore, this allows them to collaborate more effectively.
Business Sphere to Allow Leaders to Actually ‘See’ Their Data
As the Business Sufficiency models started providing rich data visualizations, P&G’s IT team realized something was missing, and after several rounds of brainstorming, the Business Sphere was conceptualized.
Fig: Business Sphere allows company leaders to harness massive amounts of data to make real-time business decisions. Source: Mckinsey.com
The Business Sphere is a meeting room with a football-shaped conference table at its center surrounded by two 30-foot-wide projection screens. It can project six different dashboard and data visualization views across the screens. There are smaller displays at each end of the room that let executives in far-flung locations join meetings via video. Remote executives can see the same data visualizations displayed in the meeting room from their laptops or iPads.
The program analyzes and connects as much as 200 terabytes of data (equal to the amount of information contained in 200,000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica) to answer a set of questions. Also, it allows for unprecedented granularity and customization. The way you present the data uncovers insights, trends, and opportunities for business leaders and prompts them to ask different and very focused business questions. If one question elicits a follow-up question, you can use data to address it on the spot.
The visualization helps people “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 differently, revealing potential solutions that previously may not have been apparent.
P&G has implemented the Business Sphere in more than 50 offices worldwide.
Decision Cockpits to Display Key Information on Desktops
Fig: Decision Cockpit makes data available on the desktops of decision-makers. Source: blogs.hbr.org
Pursuing its goal of “information democracy,” P&G has made data available on the desktops of more than 50,000 employees through the Decision Cockpit. In an article published in Information Week, Filippo Passerini, P&G’s Business Services Group President and CIO, explains that: “The decision cockpit is focused on forward-looking projections rather than historical reporting, with three-month, six-month and 12-month projected trend lines for market share, cost of goods, and margins. All of the data is drillable, meaning you drop down from the company-wide views to study performance by country, region, brand, and product.”
Data offered through the decision cockpit includes business monitoring, end-to-end initiative management, business planning, and organizational management, as well as business health assessment, initiative tracker, and overflow—all in one location. Users can add “Favorites,” focusing on just the data they need. Users also can set their own personalized default page, cutting down on search time.
“With the success of the decision cockpit, P&G has been able to do away with more than 80% of the company’s standardized business intelligence reports. Most users embraced the new approach as more attractive and usable than spreadsheet-based reports sent by email, but in some cases users had to be “forced over the hump” of reliance on the old reports”, Passerini added.
P&G’s Single Source of Truth
Each week, P&G executives across the globe meet in the Business Spheres to review the latest results and forecasts available through the decision-cockpit dashboards. Executives can discuss what to do about gains and losses based on available metrics. That might mean adjusting pricing, changing the product mix, changing merchandising approaches, or increasing marketing expenditures to regain market share where there are losses or improving margins where conditions are strong. “What’s different now is that all this data is coming together in the context of the business discussion,” Passerini said. “And because it’s the single source of truth for P&G executives around the globe, it’s not fragmented by geography or management level and, importantly, it’s coming in real time to make better decisions faster in every single business review we do.”Final Thoughts
By eliminating the delay of manually collecting and aggregating data, P&G’s data visualization and analytics systems have improved productivity and collaboration, simplified work processes, reduced the decision-making cycle time, and has enabled them to focus on innovating for the consumer. When data exists outside product and geographic silos and is made understandable and accessible, it has the power to create magic, and P&G is living proof of that. In the next post of the Data Visualization Spotlight series, read how MailChimp uses Data Visualization to help users better segment and target their subscribers.Reference
- pg.com
- us.experiencepg.com
- blogs.hbr.org
- https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/pandg-turns-analysis-into-action/d/d-id/1100010
- https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/pandgs-cio-details-business-savvy-predictive-decision-cockpit/d/d-id/1106234
- https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/why-pandg-cio-is-quadrupling-analytics-expertise/d/d-id/1102883
