May 17, 2023

The principle of “think globally, act locally” has long been important for multinational FMCG companies in their marketing and management practices. Surprisingly, this principle hasn’t been applied effectively to IT. Many FMCG organizations have adopted separate digital solutions for sales, marketing, and promotions management, as well as analytics, in each local market. However, when it comes to integrating these solutions to share insights and best practices across markets and regions within the same organization, it has become a challenging and resource-intensive endeavor.

HQ attempts to “push” global solutions without considering local market specificities, leading to poor adaptation and low utilization by local teams. Consequently, these attempts fail to provide significant insights into the company’s global understanding of the market.

The problem becomes evident in the use of Trade Promo Management/Optimization (TPM/TPO) solutions, which have a number of specific requirements:

• The need to consider the market’s maturity and its specific interactions with retailers and distributors.
• The need for integration and data exchange with other systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), SFA (Sales Force Automation), and others.
• Different approaches to calculating key indicators that are considered when calculating P&L.
• High requirements for accuracy, structuredness, and granularity of data for advanced analytics and use in AI/ML prediction and suggestions.

These requirements impose significant demands for standardizing all indicators, methods of calculation, and data collection. However, they also provide an opportunity for a highly customized adaptation of TPx solutions to match the market’s unique characteristics. The question then arises: which strategy to choose?

Pros and Cons of Different Approach to TPx Implementation

Before digging deep into what strategy should be chosen, let’s review the advantages of a unified global and adapted local approach for TPM/TPO multimarket implementation strategy:

The Most Efficient Strategy for TPx Implementation

The solution lies in combining both approaches, where a global standard solution for all markets has a certain degree of localization (different experts call it a conditional figure of 60%-70% of the standard solution and 30-40% of localization).

This approach looks beautiful in theory but is difficult to implement in practice. On one hand, advanced sophisticated TPO solutions, which are necessary for developed markets, have a lot of functionality that is unnecessary for developing markets. On the other hand, TPM for developing markets has its own specifics, such as working with small retailers, integrating promo activities with distributors, and so on.

As a result, customizing advanced and already quite expensive TPO solutions becomes an unprofitable investment, which means that the manufacturer once again faces the need to have several TPM/TPO tools.

Where is the solution? SoftServe Business Systems has developed its TPx solution PromoTool based on its experience working with clients in different markets, taking into account both basic requirements for developing markets and advanced analytics and ML functionality.

The deployment strategy for PromoTool addresses both global and local needs, following a well-established scheme and implemented in multiple stages:

After the development of the global Template Strategy, during the deployment stage, the adaptation of the solution to market specificities is carried out by simply connecting plug-ins, which enables new markets to be added by connecting new users.

PromoTool offers a comprehensive solution to data completeness and accuracy, coverage of all promotion management and optimization-related business processes, and adaptability to various market requirements, through the following features:

• A flexible solution that can be fine-tuned to meet market needs while ensuring data consistency.
• Ability to increase functionality in accordance with market changes, such as transitioning from developing to mature markets.
• The ability to add data sources as needed, leading to cost savings and adherence to budget plans.
• Full integration with SFA, B2B, BI, and other tools from SoftServe Business Systems’ digital ecosystem.

You can learn more about how PromoTool was implemented for a multi-market region by filling out the form below to get a case study.