Microsoft solutions for Connected Insights combine an easy, yet powerful, end-user experience with the control and flexibility needed by line of business practitioners. Reaching beyond the traditional scope of business intelligence (BI), providing access to critical information at all levels of the organization, these solutions offer the unique advantage of connectivity between internal and external organizations and customers. While providing this functionality, Microsoft solutions for Connected Insights can become an integral part of a larger infrastructure that includes enterprise performance management; supply chain planning, visibility, and execution; customer relationship management; and customer loyalty programs.
Able to integrate BI capabilities with your existing applications, these solutions deliver a full range of personal, team, and organizational BI tools across key functional areas in the consumer goods sector -- from enabling account managers with sales scorecards based on downstream retailer data, to giving trade promotion managers real-time visibility of ROI by promotional event, to arming supply chain practitioners with real-time demand forecasts.
MICROSOFT SOLUTIONS
Solutions to increase sales and marketing effectiveness
- Trade and consumer promotion optimization removes business performance guesswork by providing up-to-date sales, promotion, and deal performance data with daily updates to projections.
- Merchandise assortment and planning solutions enable collaboration around the vast amounts of dynamic demand and supply information, product/location attributes, historical performance, current trends, and strategic and financial objectives, helping you to best plan and execute store-level merchandise supply.
- Retail execution solutions feature rich mobile applications seamlessly integrated with intelligent in-office management components to automate day-to-day operations, optimize in-store effectiveness, and accelerate information flow to and from the field.
- Demand signal repository solutions harness the power of near-real-time, point-of-sale scan data to drive effectiveness in sales and marketing, supply chain, operations, and new product development.
- Customer loyalty and shopper analytics apply innovative data-mining algorithms that improve insights into consumer and shopper loyalty as well as market segmentation. Predictive analytics increase demand-forecast accuracy for improved product availability.
Solutions to connect the innovation process
- Collaboration and knowledge management employ dynamic cross-team communications, such as IM, Web conferences, and video chats, to enable collaboration. With Microsoft solutions, teams collaborate on idea concepts, find information quickly, manage related content, and communicate with external partners and customers.
- Increasing the speed of the innovation process compresses the innovation cycle and lets your people make decisions faster using automated process guidance combined with content and innovation process management.
- Enhanced visibility into the innovation process uses portfolio management to view the full innovation pipeline and balance ideas against resources and risks; it also enables constant visibility into key business information and performance results through tracking and reporting activities.
- Solutions to optimize supply and demand cycles Supply chain planning, visibility, and optimization provide connected insights across the entire supply chain, including the optimal placement of inventory within the supply chain and reduced operating costs through improved manufacturing, transportation, and distribution.
- Solutions to reduce operation costs and complexity Enterprise performance management delivers a full range of tightly integrated personal, team, and organizational tools and products that support organizational insight to help consumer goods companies make good decisions that drive business productivity and performance.
- Financial management gives individuals a way to raise the visibility of financial metrics and the effectiveness of financial management throughout the organization while using familiar tools and existing skills.