The SOLYS Experience
Holly Swanson, Target Team Director, Del Monte Foods
Listen to the audio version (recorded November 18, 2008)
"There's no tool like the SOLYS tool."
"I have been in the Consumer Packaged Goods business for an extraordinarily long time-probably more than 25 years-so I've seen a lot of development in the technologies. It's really been exciting over the past couple of years to find that we can actually touch so many areas of the business. The way that we have to run the business today, we really need to be enabled by technology-and that's what SOLYS is bringing to us.
The Del Monte Foods company manages not only the fruits and vegetables that you see on the shelves all the time but we also own a number of tomato brands, and a big part of our business is pet food. We do about half of our business in pet products like Meow Mix, Milk Bone, Kibbles ‘n Bits, and a lot of the snack products that you might buy for your dogs and cats.
I have two sales functions that report to me for pet and for food, as well as the category management function and the logistics function. My team has found SOLYS to be unbelievably helpful in managing our business every day. We were referred to LumiData and their SOLYS tool by another captain at Target. Whenever you get a referral from somebody else who is doing a great job you really take it seriously.
Not only did we have three category captainships at that time and two people to manage them, but in addition we were trying to figure out how to make the really robust data that we get from Target useful to our team. That was a big challenge for us. The SOLYS solution was a good answer to our category management issues, providing a way to manage the data across a number of different segments in a way that was very specific to Target, and not just specific to Del Monte. The category pieces that we manage in all areas require that we have a significant understanding of the data for different groups like vegetables, fruit and pets snacks. We needed a way to manage the data quickly. Many of our buyers were requiring that we have information-not just data, but real information-to them every week and every month. . We were spending two or three days per category, using Target's InfoRetriever and Partners Online to retrieve data, with our analysts as well as our managers trying to come up with something interesting from that data. We spent two to three days a week just managing the data, before we even got to the insights and into the category reporting back to Target. We saved an enormous amount of time by utilizing SOLYS. It takes the information we need and puts it into usable reports in a matter of hours. Using SOLYS, we probably took about 6 days of data retrieval and manipulation right out of our requirements and reduced that to a few hours. That was a huge improvement for our category folks. And then we started looking into the SOLYS data to find out how else we could use it to solve some of our chronic problems.
SOLYS has a lot of interesting charts and data points that you can bring to your buyers right away. We worked with SOLYS to design a system that was right for us, because we needed it to reflect the way that we look at the information. From day one we have been able to look at details from various departments, put the information together and produce reports that are ready to go. The category manager in charge of actual data pulls spends about three hours a week getting the data into the system. We have somewhere between nine to twelve people using SOLYS, sometimes as frequently as every day. From a category management perspective we were able to quickly turn around information on our products as well as our broad category responsibilities, in a standardized format, every single week or every month. That really helped us out a lot.
Another area where we were able to make significant changes and be able to see the dollar increase very quickly was from a supply chain management perspective. The improvement that we have seen on fill rates and instocks, and our ability to deploy product to the right DelMonte servicing DC last year alone drove 2.6 million dollars in incremental volume.
We have 380 items that Target carries from Del Monte Foods, but we found that if we could increase our instock percentage by even 1 percent, we could add a million dollars to our sales volume. We were able to help balance our logistics services from the Target servicing warehouses so that we knew product would be in stock when Target called on it. One of the really helpful things that SOLYS has is the ability to look into Target's system and anticipate what the product needs are going to be based on their consumption model. We can take the data directly out of InfoRetriever and SOLYS will convert that into shipping timelines and need timelines that are based on the different requirements that Del Monte Foods has to get the product available for deployment. Because our forecast accuracy improved so much, we were able to get a team of people on logistics to help us improve our volume and to improve our metrics with Target. Again, we do well over 100 million dollars with Target every year and when we talk about the 2.6 million dollars that we received as incremental volume, which translates to really significant profitability as well, we were able to do that over and above the growth that Target delivered to us in new distribution and item changes and in Target's growth last year themselves. So when we talk about 2.6 million dollars in incremental volume, that is just what we had from collaborating with our internal people and using the really rich and accurate data that we got out of SOLYS to generate that volume. We went back to our internal folks to share with them what the incremental volume was, and it really improved our overall relationship with them because it is so hard for some of the departments that are really at an arm's length to be able to capture their contribution to our business. While we were able to increase our overall Target business in excess of 20 million dollars, their contribution to that was 2.6 million, and that was absolutely real money to us.
SOLYS also helps us to become better partners with Target. The more that we can provide data, and the greater that data is in value, and the more we can return to the customer, the more likely we are to have a real true partnership. That is another way in which SOLYS was a huge payoff for us.
SOLYS has also improved our sales management abilities. We have been able to manage the information and receive feedback on activities, specifically promotional lifts and promotional effectiveness. For example, when we were comparing data from ad activities or TPC's we were able to figure out what was the most effective way to promote products almost immediately. We were able to look back for 2 years into the Target data with SOLYS, from the day it came online. SOLYS information is so easy to read and so deep in its basic format that there are a lot of questions that you and other people who don't even use it as often as you do can answer in a short amount of time.
One thing we are taking a close look at now is trends. A SOLYS report can look at trends in different time periods and subgroups as you define them. We look at data in 1-week, 4-week, 13-week, 26-week and 52-week time periods. We can also select our own Del Monte Foods year, which is loaded into the SOLYS system, and of course the Target year. We can select from all those time periods and see what we want to bring back to the customer or to our internal partners. Since most of us have seen price increases over the last 6 months, we want to track the dollars and the units so we can see where were are going. If I look at a 4-week time period and a 13-week time period I can really see the difference in the way that the business is trending and I can compare dollars and units very quickly to see if I am selling more or less product in a subgroup, or even in an item. Being able to have that kind of detail makes us much more accurate when we are reporting back to our business to anticipate what we are going to see in the next 4 weeks or the next quarter or even for the balance of the year. What we are finding at Del Monte Foods is that we have a better prediction method because we can access our customer level data and look at what they're previewing, and also look at very short term or more long term time periods and comparing units and dollars. That seems like a really simple thing, but when we have to actually act on our data and find ways to make suggestions to our businesses or report back to our businesses about what we expect and what we are seeing I have found no tool like the SOLYS tool in how it deals with my business and my business at Target."