As more data collection opportunities become available for companies in the consumer products industry, it’s critical to consider investment in solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud for reporting and analytics. Using information from point of sale, loyalty programs, and social media, advanced analytics can help companies find hidden insights in their data and increase personalization to drive repeat customers while improving business performance. Businesses in the consumer products industry should seek out ways to optimize these processes to save time, money, and resources – it can help by providing one simple and holistic platform.

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

It is a unified analytics platform that centralizes data from several data sources providing basic reporting and advanced analytical capabilities within one platform. The solution provides a unified and scalable platform with augmented and predictive analytics capabilities. Predictive analytics can help companies maintain awareness of their workforce health, diversity, and overall structure to best utilize change-making resources. This SAP tool does this with the help of a single platform that allows stakeholders from all levels within a company to collaborate and aggregate data, eventually producing visualizations and highly plausible performance predictions.

Operating in a “new normal”, many consumer products companies have faced disruptions resulting from COVID-19. Businesses should consider utilizing SAP Analytics Cloud to increase agility and flexibility with consideration for new digital sales channels, packaging adjustments, and demand variations. Being able to conduct these reassessments at a large scale based on unusual or limited data will help stabilize inventory levels and ensure better customer service. Reporting and analytics using SAP Analytics Cloud helps adjust for these large, rapid demand changes. Overall, consumer products companies should invest in SAP Analytics Cloud because it provides a platform for business insights, remote collaboration, and prediction.

Reason 1: Business Insights

Moving away from older and less sophisticated reporting solutions, SAP Analytics Cloud provides automated analytics and instant insights based on machine learning. This enables users to quickly make decisions based on performance metrics drawn from live data. Instantly, this improves the experience for users, and provides insights on KPIs in real time through dashboards and other interactive visualization methods. The tool’s natural language understanding capabilities also allow users to get answers to the questions asked in simple English. SAP Analytics Cloud has a particular value for employees in analyst or management roles, since it can provide insights on key indicators related to financial performance and budgeting, risk, and other planning metrics. It can increase accuracy of data reporting, forecast growth with machine learning, manage product information, observe revenue metrics, and track marketing ROI, to name a few.

Reason 2: Remote Collaboration

Tools that facilitate and simplify collaboration are becoming more important due to the transition to remote work. This tool provides help users share information and gain input across their organization, supporting fast information exchange from systems with many features through AI-driven, cloud-based data visualization. As an end-to-end solution, all data can affect and improve predictive analytics, integrating all organizational levels. This allows lower cost due to less integration required for all users, and added benefits lie in the ability to easily connect to systems through a single solution.

Reason 3: Accurate Forecasting with SAP Analytics Cloud

One of the most important uses for SAP Analytics Cloud right now is its forecasting module augmented with predictive analytics capabilities and visualization tools. This can affect decisions made by analysts all the way up to upper level leadership and can be especially useful when working with customers, buyers, or suppliers. It also helps with demand planning, revenue planning, P&L, budgeting, workforce constraints, and increased inventory visibility.

SAP Analytics Cloud creates plans based on market share, geographic, sales, and distribution reports as well. Users can obtain a deep look into data and even run simulations to understand performance at every business level to form strategic plans and monitor models, encouraging proactive adjustments and improving performance.

SAP Analytics Cloud provides so many capabilities and benefits for consumer products companies. Through tools like revenue and sales returns visualizations, SAP Analytics Cloud helps businesses identify issues, then find an answer that can be implemented with future planning. While it won’t solve every ad hoc question, it will save time and money by providing comprehensive, rapid data analysis and reporting – especially relevant to senior leadership. If this seems to be a good fit for your business, Clarkston can help you with integration and implementation.

Contributions by Shantanu Mukherjee and Courtney Loughran.