Business Challenge:

The client is one of the biggest retail and distribution conglomerates in the GCC, with outlets across multiple geographies. To direct staff performance and incentivize them, the client sets monthly sales goals. They aimed to make the process of creating sales targets (product section level) more data-driven, scientific, and accurate based on past data. The client also required benchmarks at the daily and weekly levels to monitor sales progress in relation to the target throughout the month, with a system in place to monitor objective accomplishment at the day, week, month, and YTD levels. To achieve this, we needed to devise a target-setting process with improved accuracy and create an automated and comprehensive BI dashboard providing a detailed view of the determined sales target versus the performance.

TurnB Approach:

Identified Promotion Parameters -> 2. Metrics Identification -> 3. Dashboard Development- Do we need to include this as well?

• Arranged sessions with stakeholders to gain more insights into their incentive policies and beneficiaries.
• Acquired an understanding of the promotion-intensive market and realized the necessity to factor in promotions while allocating targets.
• Identified promotion parameters such as Theme/Concept, Product sections involved, Frequency, Duration, Week preference, Previous occurrences, and Marketing activities.
• Distributed overall store sales target among product sections (e.g., grocery, home appliances) based on their monthly targets. This was done by factoring in each section’s sales contribution, seasonality, current sales trend, and presence of promotion campaigns.
• Allocated section-wise monthly targets each day, considering the day, the day’s position within a month, and the presence of promotion campaigns. The section-day level sales target allocated for the upcoming days of that month gets modified if there’s a deficit in sales against the target sales MTD.
• Distributed MTD sales deficit among the upcoming days of the month considering the aforementioned factors, enabling them to devise an appropriate course of action.
• Formulated various KPIs/metrics to provide a holistic evaluation of sales against the target MTD. The deficits are identified and reallocated for upcoming days to achieve the target; also, sales forecasts and quick identification of top/underperforming products are done.
• Developed a Power BI dashboard for audiences at different hierarchy levels with varying information privileges.
• Made reports agile to view in different and niche contexts, allowing them to be sliced and diced at various levels.
• Included a date slicer to analyze sales performance during the selected custom period.
• Provided a provision to drill through from the report to a product section level deep dive view with day, week, month, YTD tracking, and factors like transactions and basket value to describe the scenario.

The Solution:

• Devised a precise and methodical process to allocate the monthly target to each product section.
• Distributed the section monthly target among the days and set it as a benchmark against which daily sales performance is evaluated.
• Day-level target distribution predicts the sales required on each day of the month, achieving 95% accuracy relative to actuals.
• Developed an automated and comprehensive BI dashboard that monitors sales progress, providing vital business visibility at daily, weekly, MTD, and YTD levels.

Implications:

• The automated BI dashboard enabled smoother reporting, improved data integrity, and a reduction in manual labor/cost.
• Day-level tracking dashboard enabled store/department managers to quickly identify product sections that are off/on course day-by-day and to employ proactive measures to achieve the sales target throughout the month.
• Accurate day-level sales forecasting allowed managers to anticipate sales trends in advance, facilitating the implementation of relevant sales strategies.