NEWS
Europasta now manages its sales events via BNS
One precondition for success in the production and sale of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) is the proper handling of sales events. It is no secret that sales at such events reach up to 80 percent of overall sales in some FMCG areas. Hence the original philosophy of using sales events as an extraordinary boost for consumers has become a nearly everyday reality, resulting in hundreds of sales events per year. These events need to be coordinated both in terms of timing and location, and also need to be adjusted to available supplier and production capacities. The Promotool and Promolyser tools in BNS support a range of FMCG companies in the area of event management. Europasta is one of the most recent acquisitions in this area.
Modelling and planning of sales events
BNS Promotool has become indispensable for our dealer teams when planning and modelling sales events. David Klíma, an IT specialist at Europasta, added: “We have actually gone beyond that and also use Promotool as a tool for communication between dealers and the administrator of root data. We do not just enter events into Promotool, but also the standard requirements for entering and changing prices for individual customers. We thus also use Promotool as a workflow tool, which allows the root data administrator to easily “read” their new tasks, process them based on the specifications, and “mark” them as completed as soon as they do not need to see the task as active anymore.” The dealer will find all the important information for the planning of promo events at a single location: the development of sales in past periods, the price list prices of the given article, as well as an overview of other planned events – both their own and those of other team members. The specified parameters of the promo event (e.g., the event shelf dates, discount percentage, pre-purchasing period for retail, special offer prices, amounts sold during the special offer, etc.) are automatically evaluated by the system in real time, and the dealer can thus directly adjust the event’s parameters to achieve the target in Promotool. At the same time, Promotool acts as an integration platform connected to various source systems, meaning it is no longer necessary to search for important information that supports decision-making from other information sources.
Coordination of sales and production logistics
The solution for successful sales events lies in balancing the price for the final customer with the available production and supplier capacities, with the aim of achieving a higher gross margin. The principle behind the events is based on the price elasticity of demand, where the lost unit gross margin due to the discount is more than compensated for by the increased number of units sold, and the overall margin for the period thus increases. To this end, the thinking on the side of the sales must be coordinated with the supplier and potentially also production capacities: empty shelves and unsatisfied customer demand due to excessive discounts also represents lost margin. Checking the timeliness of the entry of the event is set as an automatic algorithm in the system, which assesses whether the event has been planned sufficiently in advance and is thus feasible with respect to available production capacities.
The dealer planning the event receives this information in real time and can thus react to it by initiating internal negotiations on the conditions under which capacity could be increased or on updating the plan’s timing parameters.
Approval workflow support
The system supports the entry of economic efficiency criteria for an event, and the event is approved based on the gross unit margin per kilogram (if it is above the upper limit) or rejected (if it is below the lower limit).
If the gross unit margin lies between these limits, the business director receives a daily email report containing events for possible approval, and they then approve them by changing their status in the system (either to approved or rejected). The approval status is saved at event level and can thus also be used for the evaluation of events. “Approval conditions may be defined at product group or specific SKU level. It depends what one prefers,” David Klíma explained.
Analyses, reporting, and Promolyser
The evaluation of the results of sales events is carried out via the Promolyser app – a tool to analyse and present the results of promo events. This tool, which makes full use of the advantages of the web environment, allows users to define tabular and graphical objects for evaluating events, e.g., based on the number of participating customers, duration, articles, or approval mode (automatic or manual). Promolyser integrates both the planned values from Promotool as well as the actual values obtained from primary record-keeping systems, and thus enables efficient checking of events by management as well as providing feedback to dealers regarding how well their expectations were met. The ease of access of the presented information and the quality of the graphical presentations form the foundations for their actual use. “Full integration with other BNS modules is also a matter of course. In our conditions, we make use of the Sales Performance module, meaning we get easy access to the so-called promoshare – the share of sales during special offers compared to total sales,” Europasta’s IT specialist concluded.
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