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The
Problem
The
Activity Manager is a software application that was developed
for a large global consumer goods organization to track and
analyze the advertising and marketing efforts for hundreds of
products. The main drivers for the creation of the software
were to most effectively utilize advertising dollars across the
organization, to track actual costs incurred against budgets and
to allow management to make informed decisions regarding the
timing of advertising and marketing efforts.
The
client organization needed a way to track aggregated future
advertising budgets by week across the entire organization.
Since each brand had their own advertising budget and agenda
that could change daily, it was impossible to know how much
money the organization as a whole was spending during any given
week. The organization also wanted a way to track advertising
dollars spent per product line to be able to measure and analyze
the effectiveness of different forms of advertising.
The
Solution
The
Activity Manager application was integrated with the Market
Manager application to allow for the sharing of necessary
information across the sales and the marketing departments. The
software allows each brand manager to enter upcoming advertising
blocks, by product, along a 24-month calendar timeline.
Supporting ad data is entered as well so that any user can
easily select a product from a list and instantaneously view two
years worth of advertising and promotions projections. Users
can click on any date on a two year timeline to drill down to
underlying cost, sales and unit figures along with any comments
if they exist. The Marketing Manager supplies current status
data to users and the Activity Manager is a forecasting and
budgeting tool.
Results and Benefits
The
various types of analysis that can be extracted from the
Activity Manager are meant to provide insightful information so
that advertising dollars make the most impact at the right
time. The application saved many man-hours of labour that was
spent manually trying to track and forecast advertisements,
promotions, in-store displays and media creation. Employees are
now more efficient and productive with their time and the
budgeting aspect assures that management is alerted at a very
early stage so that there are no big surprises at year end. The
time savings to employees is quite large, and it goes without
saying that they are very happy to not have to perform manual
tracking tasks on a regular basis.
Management can base their decisions on accurate information and
analyses and the application successfully tied together the
activities of the various brand groups. An exact dollar amount
is difficult to calculate because many of the benefits are
intangible, but when management bases major spending decisions
on the analysis provided by the Activity Manager, it can be said
that the tool adds a lot of value to the organization.
Visit
our
Activity Manager demo page to see the software application
in action.
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