Target Tracker Articulation for a Retail Giant

Client Background

Client is one of the biggest retail and distribution conglomerates in the GCC, having outlets across multiple geographies. To direct staff performance and to incentivize them, the client sets monthly sales goals. They wanted the process of creating sales targets (product section level) to be more data-driven, scientific, and accurate with respective to 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 do so, we needed to devise a target setting process with improved accuracy and create an automated and comprehensive BI dashboard providing a molecular view of the determined sales target v/s the performance.

TurnB Approach

Identify Promotion Parameters -> Metrics Identification -> Dashboard Development

Arranged sessions with the stakeholders to gain more insights into their incentive policies and beneficiaries
Acquired understanding into the promotion intensive market and realized the necessity to factor in promotion while allocating the target
Identified promotion parameters like Theme/Concept, Product sections involved, Frequency, Duration, Week preference, Previous occurrences and Marketing activities
As the incentives are planned from the sales manager level and upwards in the organizational hierarchy and each manager is assigned with product sections like grocery, home appliance etc., the provided overall store sales target is distributed among these product sections as their monthly target. This is done by factoring in each section’s sales contribution, seasonality, current sales trend, presence of promotion campaigns etc.
Section wise month target is allocated each day. This was done by factoring in 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 will be modified if there’s a deficit in sales against the target sales MTD
The MTD sales deficit will be distributed 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 forecast and quick identification of top/underperforming products are also done
Power BI dashboard was developed for audience at different hierarchy levels with varying information privileges
To view in different and niche contexts the reports are made agile, to be sliced and diced at various levels
Included a date slicer to analyze the sales performance during the selected custom period
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 & methodical process to allocate the month target to each product section
Distributed the section monthly target amongst 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, which is achieved with 95% accuracy respective to actuals
Developed an automated and comprehensive BI dashboard that monitors the sales progress and gain vital business visibility at daily, weekly, MTD and YTD level

Implications

Automated BI dashboard which enabled smoother reporting, improved data integrity and reduction in manual labor/cost
Day level tracking dashboard enabled store/department managers to quickly identify product-sections which 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 the managers to get the sales trend in advance which was used to employ relevant sales strategies