T-Pro Solutions Best Practices Blog

Hunter or Prey... Why Trade Optimization is Critical to M&A in the CPG Industry

Much has been made of the shrinking landscape of the Consumer Goods industry with particular vulnerability brought to light with the “mega” acquisition announcements in the last 6 months companies such as Kraft Heinz Co.’s play for Unilever and Mondelez’s offer for Hershey. What comes to light in...

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How to Nurture a Healthy Trade Investment – Part 1: Diagnosis

This is the first in a two-part series discussing the practical capabilities that CPG companies need to have to create and maintain a healthy and growth-focused trade promotion investment. Part 1 focuses on the need for a trade promotions’ checkup driven by analytical insight.

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Looking to Stay Ahead of the Competition? 3 Questions CPG Execs Need to Answer Before Pursuing Analytics

“Only 13.3% [of surveyed finance professionals] are pursuing the full complement of descriptive, prescriptive and predictive analytics, while nearly three times as many (34.9%) indicated that they do not even know which forms of analytics their companies have adopted,” according to the Wall Street ...

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Managing the Future Through Data-Driven, Fact-Based Decisions Cultivates Crucial Trust Between CFOs and Their Finance Departments

What’s your relationship with your CFO? Are you providing the answers about your trade program that they need? How do you know?

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More than Just Spending: Why Turning Trade Spend into Trade Investment is Crucial for CPGs

While many companies tend to think forward as far as planning, they haven’t been able to look forward in terms of trade spend versus trade investment. Currently, most CPG companies manage trade on transactional level, meaning that it’s money in, money out. With this approach trade spend is seen as...

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An Analytics Revolution Resolution

Over 90% of CFOs surveyed by consulting firm Kaufman Hall said that their top goal for 2017 revolves around utilizing their data at hand to make critical decisions, according to CFO.com Staff Writer, Sean Allocca’s article “Analytics CFOs’ Top Goal for 2017: Better Analysis and Reporting.

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Living on the Edge: How to Build Better Financial Guardrails with TPO

One of the responsibilities that CPG Finance and Revenue Management Departments are tasked with is putting in place and monitoring “guardrails” to protect organizational investment and revenue generation. Historically, trade promotion is an area where putting these guardrails in place is...

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How to Solve Trade Marketing Problems Surrounding FP&A (Failure to Produce Answers)

Many CFOs today find themselves forced to allocate more funds into trade promotion a quantified return on the incremental investment. In fact, an article on CFO.com by reporter David McCann, “Disappointed with FP&A? Ramp Up Tech Spending,” cites the Association for Finance Professionals’ new survey...

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3 expectations of analytics driven financial review

Entering the final quarter of the year, many CPG finance executives are balancing evaluating key performance indicators to explain this year’s business while also reviewing the 2017 budget and projections. Furthermore, as we have stated in previous posts (see Not my job? Or is it? More CFO’s are...

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Two Peas in a Pod – Trade promotion optimization helps CPGs move toward Portfolio optimization

When we think of trade promotion investment we tend to focus on connecting isolated events to overall brand or category performance. This is challenging by itself due to a limited ability of some Consumer Goods companies to harmonize their data and gain visibility to a quantified ROI of promoted...

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