Catherina Hyde, Author at CACI

Nestle Gets Greener By Reducing Rep Miles

Posted on: 12 July 2021

Nestlé’s sales operation in the Oceania region encompasses Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Nestlé Oceania employs more than 5,000 people in over 70 offices, factories and distribution centres strategically located across the region, promoting and distributing brands including many household names, such as Nescafé, Nesquik, Milo, Maggi, Carnation, Kit Kat, Aero, Smarties and Soothers.

The Challenge

It had been many years since a comprehensive review was performed on Nestlé’s field operations, and they were keen to ensure that it was run in a more efficient manner.

Nestlé also wanted to understand what the best service model looked like through a bottom-up build of the work required to be undertaken, ensuring the right resources were delivered to the right stores at the right time. The aim was to arrive at a final strategic solution that delivered great service for Nestlé’s customers, but in a way that ensured that sales reps were given challenging, achievable workloads and also spending considerably less time stuck behind the wheel of a car. As a respected corporation, with a stated commitment to environmental sustainability, minimising the environmental impact of the salesforce was also of great importance.

The Solution

Nestlé Australia, worked with the team at CACI, initially on a consultancy basis, to perform two major pieces of work.

The first was to create the ideal territories for the sales team, determined by various sets of criteria. This was not just about benefitting from the sophisticated optimisation algorithms within CACI’s headcount analysis and territory optimisation software, InSite FieldForce, but also then engaging in interactive workshops with CACI’s experienced consultants to achieve a final solution that was efficient, but also addressed the challenges of some important business considerations.

Once the territories had been identified, CACI’s routing software, CallSmart, was then utilised to develop the most efficient routes to service the stores.

Nestlé were impressed by the speed and efficacy of the CACI solutions and team of experienced analysts. Knowing that their market was always prone to change, Nestlé took a decision to license the software to ensure they could maintain the level of efficiencies gained in the initial phase.

I had the opportunity of working closely with the team at CACI on a large project that lasted over six months. We relied heavily on the software to provide facts and insight into how we should set up our supermarket field team most efficiently. The results have been extremely positive, highlighting how we can do more with less when we operate a lean and efficient team. With the expertise that we have developed, we are now using the software together with what we learned through the project to drive further efficiencies through our non-grocery business.

Ross Stephenson – Project Manager, Nestle

The Results

Through a combination of the software and consultancy support from CACI, during both the initial project and ongoing use of the licence, Nestlé were able to rework their territories to give field staff:

More productive time in store
Less unproductive time in the car
Territories that were closer to home

Subsequently, Nestlé has been able to significantly reduce its carbon footprint, through a large reduction in the kilometres travelled by the field team. Nestlé estimate this to be around 1.7 million kilometres less per year, which equates to roughly 42 laps of the world, or 90 million party balloons less CO2 being emitted.

Further Information

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force expertise can help you and your team, get in contact now. We have a range of solutions that can help you optimise your field force.

Optimised Field Sales Team Deliver Double Digit Revenue Growth

Posted on: 2 July 2021

Perfetti Van Melle (PVM) is one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of confectionery and chewing gum, headquartered in The Netherlands. PVM’s global brands are enjoyed in over 150 countries and include Mentos, Chupa Chups, Fruit-tella & Smint.

The Challenge

Before engaging with CACI, PVM UK were manually planning their field sales territories and routes, which the management team knew was inefficient.
PVM wanted a tool to help grow their UK business, specifically in the independent channel where they had under traded in the past. Due to the unknown returns and instability in this market, they needed to drive efficiencies and savings in their current field team, rather than recruiting more headcount. Being more efficient would allow PVM to call on more stores in the independent channel.

The Solution

PVM licenced InSite FieldForce, CACI’s resource planning and territory optimisation tool, to understand the utilisation of the current team, taking into consideration variables such as travel time, visit frequencies, in call times, and the additional visits to be made to the Independent channel.
The field sales territories were optimised to create workload balanced and drive time efficient territories for each field sales rep, built around their home locations.
PVM then used CallSmart, CACI’s route optimisation software, to optimise routes for their team. Planning with an algorithm gave them more control over the stores, and channels, the reps were visiting based on business strategy rather than ‘gut feel’.

The Results

PVM were able to model multiple what-if scenarios prior to implementation which gave them the confidence that they could be impactful in the independent channel whilst maintaining appropriate call coverage to the multiples.
Using CACI’s tools, PVM minimised the risk associated with entering a new channel, without investing in any additional headcount. The efficiencies gained enabled PVM to make thousands of additional calls to the independent channel, resulting in a double digit increase in sales revenue across the field sales team.
CACI’s tools are used by PVM on an ongoing basis to maintain efficiencies and immediately respond to change. Optimised call schedules integrate with their retail execution solution providing reps with visibility of their calendars allowing the team to be more agile.

Further Information

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force expertise can help you and your team, get in contact now. We have a range of solutions that can help you optimise your field force.

Agile Field Force Planning For a Leading US Retail Merchandising Specialist

Posted on:

Lawrence Merchandising Services (LMS) is a full-service retail merchandising organisation with experienced field staff across all 50 states and Canada. The firm is committed to increasing sales and profits for clients by delivering in-store solutions for their merchandising needs. LMS works for clients in many respected retail brands.

The Challenge

Over the last two years, LMS has seen strong growth in its retail merchandising activities. From a base of long-standing traditional retail accounts, LMS made the decision to expand and seize new opportunities.

Director of Data Analytics Michael Terpkosh explains: “With more and more retailer accounts across the US and Canada, we needed something to help us understand those clients’ businesses better, so we could deploy our field teams efficiently and continue delivering great service.”

“Before this, LMS had limited technology resources for field force planning. Say if we were bringing on a new client with 5,000 stores, we would have used Google maps to put pins against their locations, then compared it to a map showing where LMS already had reps working. It was not efficient and didn’t give us multiple scenario modelling or optimisation capabilities.”

Previously, LMS matched the incremental growth of its long-standing customers over time, adding more reps as needed. Michael adds: “With one of our new accounts, we service over 16,000 stores a month. At that level, we needed structured guidance and support with the complex task of refining overlaps with other reps and retail stores. We had to expand our network of field reps quickly but it was vital to do it accurately, investing in the right places to service existing customers and new business.

The Solution

“We chose InSite FieldForce because we could not find any other solution that could handle our volume of business across every US state,” says Michael. “We felt this was the only application that could accommodate our scale and continuing growth.”

InSite FieldForce supports LMS’ move from a traditional merchandising company to a fast-growing, digitally led business with headroom for further expansion. The solution has enabled LMS to change its approach, moving towards more territory-based reps rather than recruiting for particular accounts. This helps LMS operate more efficiently, with reps working in the area where they live and servicing multiple clients.

The solution is now embedded in LMS’ business processes, from onboarding new clients to continually reviewing and optimising deployment of existing reps across the USA. CACI’s InSite FieldForce integrates with other software from another provider, giving LMS strong analytics capability across its entire field operation. LMS uses CACI’s InSite FieldForce along with Movista’s Natural Insight software to run LMS Client Services and Operations, enhancing field team performance.

The benefits are not just internal and operational. “We expected to keep InSite FieldForce behind the scenes and use it to optimise our planning. But we’re also using it to demonstrate our capability in RFPs, showing clients the capabilities that we have to work in the field with a widespread account,” Michael explains.

“There’s nothing in the marketplace that measures up to CACI’s InSite FieldForce for national coverage across the USA and Canada. It’s unique, customisable and a perfect fit for retail field businesses. InSite FieldForce has been a direct enabler of our business growth to the level we’re at – and where we’re going next. It started out that we wanted to use it to run our existing business more efficiently and now it’s become a part of our strategy. It’s credit to CACI that it’s become an integral part of how we look at existing and new business.”

Michael Terpkosh – Director of Data Analytics, LMS

The Results

Michael Terpkosh identifies many benefits of using InSite FieldForce. “It helps us with client retention – they know we can adapt and refine our team to match the evolution of their business. In the pandemic we’ve had to be more nimble and flexible. When clients have needed us to help them retune their store calling programmes, we’ve been able to do what-if analysis to show the impact of changes to coverage or visit frequency. Clients know we have the tools and expertise to work with them to optimise their approach.”

Using InSite FieldForce at proposal stage means LMS can ensure that new engagements will be profitable. Michael says, “We typically get a list of stores to be serviced and their addresses – we can plot out the stores and model their estimated service requirements against our existing reps’ locations. That shows us how we’ll need to change our field force – who to add and how to optimise our existing people. We can predict the costs of recruitment and on-boarding for a new account.”

There’s also a benefit for LMS’ field-based employees. “In the current employment market, some reps are nervous about working on just one or two accounts – they’d rather work with multiple accounts and work more hours. InSite FieldForce means we can optimise our workforce to give people those opportunities. We want to hire great reps who will be motivated in their work: it’s a virtuous circle as clients then get high quality representation from committed, expert people.”

Further Information

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force expertise can help you and your team, get in contact now.

How Monkey Puzzle enriched their customer insight with accurate demographic data

Posted on: 25 June 2021

Company Background

Monkey Puzzle is the UK’s largest day nursery franchise network, with over 60 nurseries nationwide. For over thirty years, the Monkey Puzzle team has worked closely with parents, staff and Ofsted to deliver childcare of the highest quality, providing children aged three months to five years with unlimited opportunities to learn, develop and grow within a safe, secure and caring environment.

An award-winner in the 2020 Day Nurseries Top 20, Monkey Puzzle is growing strongly. It is always looking for new franchise sites and opportunities, led by a dedicated head office team. Monkey Puzzle also operates a handful of day nurseries directly, providing a benchmark of best practice for franchisees.

The Challenge

Understand the opportunities in franchise locations with enriched local customer insight.

Sophie Hailey is Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate, explains:

Before we engaged with CACI, when we were looking at a new site, the only demographic research we would do was competitor analysis. We would type the site postcode into the OFSTED website and look at comparable sites in a five mile radius. We would mystery shop them to find out about what they offered, the fees and waiting lists, to help us establish a suitable proposition and pricing for our potential new nursery.

When you visit a site, you can get a good feel for a location. This is really important, as is the competitor research, but we needed more information and evidence to back up our decisions, as our network expands. We wanted to give our franchisees confidence as well as committing to the right sites for our model. The more relevant insight we have, the better our decisions can be.

The Approach

Sophie Hailey, Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate talked to CACI about Monkey Puzzle’s franchising and the kind of information that was important in her decision-making process. Acorn and InSite reporting would give Sophie and the team access to valuable customer demographic and local market information to enrich their understanding of new and existing sites and opportunities in the local area. Sophie explains:

The site reports we generate help us to narrow down potential sites quickly – we look at a number of factors about the catchment that tell us whether it’s worth investigating a proposed site further. We can see how close it is to existing sites, so we can avoid cannibalisation, as well as how strong the customer demand might be in the local community and workforce.

The Results

With InSite reporting and Acorn data, Sophie and her colleagues have a clear, shared knowledge base that informs the franchise development process with consistent and up-to-date customer and location information.

Our nurseries are currently gathering postcode information from existing customers, so we can map exactly where they come from in each catchment. This will help us understand our existing customer base better and recommend how to customise the proposition and marketing for different types of location.

Sophie Hailey, Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate

Read the case study

Please take a look to the full customer story here. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.

Adobe Campaign Classic 8 and Adobe Workfront – Sometimes it’s the Little Things

Posted on: 26 May 2021

CACI is an Adobe partner with experience of implementing, optimising and running Adobe’s Experience Cloud for our clients. We’ve been following the developments in Adobe’s product development and will be sharing our insights here. In this post, David Moore shares his view of the integration between Adobe Workfront and the new version of Adobe Campaign.

Watching the introduction to Adobe Campaign Classic 8 in this year’s Adobe Summit I was taken by JJ Haglund’s top 10 innovations. Sitting at number 10 was the “close integration with Adobe Workfront”, a product Adobe acquired in 2020. It sparked an immediate interest. Why? Let’s go on a journey.

Marketing is no longer the free for all it was. You can no longer sell Snake Oil and get away with it (apart from hi-fi industry see footnote *). Especially in the UK, marketing is now closely regulated and in certain verticals such as financial services, energy, telecoms there are external bodies who have the authority to audit a company’s marketing and apply fines if they find inappropriate marketing practices.

As such for any marketing campaign, organisations in these sectors, must have an audit trail for a campaign including the assets that makes up that campaign and the audiences selected to receive the campaign. For example, in the retail finance sector the principles of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) include explicit and implicit guidance on the fair treatment of customers. This fair treatment defines six consumer outcomes that firms should strive to achieve. Three of these are: –

Products and services marketed and sold in the retail market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.
Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.

So, the selection criteria for customers to be included in an email, SMS, DM, outbound or push marketing campaign needs to include a justification for the selection of the audience, including sign-off, to be recorded for audit purposes.

Also, all the assets chosen for a campaign such as the images and copy need to go through an audited approval process, passing through both the marketing management and legal teams to ensure that customers are being treated fairly. Every sign-off needs to be recorded in case the FCA come knocking and pick on some campaigns to audit. Also, we must remember that a campaign is not just email/SMS/push/DM, but also billboards, TV, YouTube, social media, radio, off the page. All the assets making up the overall campaign, across all distribution channels, need to go through the same process.

So, I’m really excited about Adobe Workfront integration into Adobe Campaign. For our regulated customers (and regulation across the marketing industry is only set to increase) Adobe Campaign and Adobe Workfront looks like a real winner. I’d certainly have ranked it higher than 10. And if you also have Adobe Experience Manager then Workfront integrates with that as well ensuring all assets have been built, reviewed, and tagged appropriately.

An interesting story. I was involved in a pitch to a large regional financial services organisation. We were invited to pitch the two best marcomms tools (Adobe Campaign and Unica) at the time, our presentation was to cover both the campaign management and asset audit management capabilities of the tools. At the time Adobe excelled in Campaign Management but was flawed in Asset Management, Unica was also good in Campaign Management (though poor in delivery integration) and we thought was OK in Asset Management but not a class leader. Which won?

Neither. Unica came close but could not handle radio, TV and social media assets. The company went purely with an audit asset management tool and to my knowledge have still to buy a campaign management tool.

(* cables that are directional: Really?)

If you are considering what the announcements from Adobe Summit mean for your business, please get in touch and we can arrange an initial consultation to help.

It’s Time to Calculate Your Savings From Premise-Level Geocoding

Posted on: 9 March 2021

Do your delivery drivers still rely on less precise data to find the right destination? Your profits are likely to be taking a hit if so.

In the pandemic and beyond, deliveries and logistics companies have proved how vital they are to keeping consumers and businesses supplied with the goods they need. With demand at an all-time high that’s unlikely to drop, getting deliveries and parcels to their destination on time has never been more important.

The demand means business is booming for logistics – an efficient and profitable operation is crucial for long-term success.

The baseline is getting the consignment into the hands or onto the doorstep of the correct recipient in the agreed delivery window. Logistics operators need to schedule an optimal but achievable number of drops per route to meet customer requirements. Unrealistic scheduling is a big problem when it means deliveries are outstanding at the end of the day. It causes frustration to recipients and stress to drivers and costs money in penalties and customer service administration, as well as the knock-on effect of redelivery costs.

Postcode Level Addressing is not Accurate Enough Today

Why do deliveries take longer than expected? One of the key reasons is insufficiently granular address information. If you’re working with postcodes, the destination shown on the satnav typically encompasses fifteen residences or premises. Your driver arrives at the centre of the postcode destination, then has to look around to find the actual delivery doorstep.

In an ordinary street of houses where it’s easy and lawful to stop on the roadside, the driver’s common sense and familiarity with the area should mean this doesn’t cause much delay. But in an unfamiliar area, in the dark, on a red route or one-way system, or when it’s a multi-occupation building or one set off the road, the seconds and minutes tick by while the driver is searching for the right address and a place to stop their vehicle safely nearby.

In rural areas, postcode sectors can cover a large area – the destination address may not even be within sight. In a block of flats, it takes time to reach a tenth-floor doorstep. If you’re delivering a sofa rather than a small package, delays relating to parking availability and the distance between the vehicle and the household are further amplified.

Pinpoint the Exact Destination With Premise-Level Data

There is a better alternative. If you use information based on specific, address-level data from CACI, your driver can receive directions to the exact household where the delivery needs to go. You can enhance this with information about road networks and conditions, parking rules and the nature of the access to the building. They’ll know if the address is on a red route with no stopping allowed, where the nearest legal parking is, what storey the delivery address is on. Your schedule can allow time for all these, and even account for the likely traffic conditions in the area at that time, which might affect the ability to find a stopping space on-street.

Time Savings Add Up Quickly Across Your Delivery Network

How much time can premise-level geocoding save? CACI’s recent research shows that if a driver can proceed straight to the correct location rather than having to hunt for the house in a wider area, it’s likely to save an average of at least 30 seconds and 110 metres per delivery. This may not sound much, but try factoring it up for the number of deliveries per vehicle, per day and the number of vehicles you’re operating, locally or nationally. For instance, in a year, a fleet of 500 vehicles, each making ten daily drops, could save over £140,000 in time and over £30,000 in mileage.

In some areas, whether rural or densely packed with warren-like housing estates and complex road systems, the time per drop using postcode level addressing only can increase by three and half minutes. We found examples of this due to one-way systems, remote country addresses and suburban destinations where the postcode covers an elongated area.

Beyond Efficiency: Customer Satisfaction and Driver Wellbeing

The efficiency and profitability of your delivery operation is a top priority, but there are other benefits of pinpointing delivery addresses accurately. Accurate and realistic scheduling improves drivers’ experience, reducing stress, increasing job satisfaction, creating less driver turnover and enhancing your ability to attract the best candidates. Customer satisfaction will be higher and your teams will spend less time resolving problems and scheduling redeliveries. Clear information about where to stop for a delivery means safer driving and less frustration to neighbours and other drivers, if vehicles can come to a halt confidently and legally. That helps with brand perceptions and PR for your organisation.

Datasets and Tools Are Available Now to Give You Accurate Insight

The benefits of premise level geocoding are so strong that we believe every home delivery organisation should adopt it as soon as possible, for efficiency, competitiveness and to improve driver and customer satisfaction. At CACI, we have a range of affordable off-the-shelf products and solutions that will deliver results for logistics operations of all sizes.

It makes clear financial sense to work out the ROI for your organisation – what would regaining 30 seconds per delivery mean in profit and additional capacity for your business? Get in touch if you would like to find out.

The Importance of Using the Right Data in Home Delivery

Posted on: 23 February 2021

The simplest of logistics setups is challenging enough, with so many things to take into account, including but not limited to vehicle capacities and constraints, driver hours, delivery time windows, traffic, legal and physical road constraints, wages, fuel costs, locations of delivery points… the list goes on and on. A logistics manager trying to strike the right balance of meeting customer expectations, staying legal whilst turning in a profit is a valuable asset.

However, delivering to homes as opposed to business addresses typically throws up additional layers of complexity, which must be overcome. One way of overcoming them is by ensuring that the right data is used for the specific logistics home delivery setup.

Here are five examples of how the right data can help facilitate a smooth cost-effective operation, whilst using the wrong data can be frustrating, inefficient, and costly.

1 – Residential

Firstly, residential. The spread of residential addresses typically occupies smaller footprints than businesses and the precise location is less easy to pin down. A warehouse, business park or office block may have its own postcode, whereas one residential or rural postcode has on average 17 addresses – the maximum being 100. Many companies try to deliver to a customers’ postcode, which is an area, not a precise point. This can cause confusion, unnecessary time spent by the driver finding the desired address, longer routes and result in unnecessary costs. If ‘premise level’ data is used to plan routes, they will be more precise, resulting is less frustration and lower costs. This is a detailed subject and CACI will be publishing a more detailed article shortly which takes a deeper dive into the science of ‘premise level geocoding’ – watch this space.

2 – Building Type

Secondly, the drivers may need to spend a differing amount of time at each customer address. For example once parked, taking five bags of groceries to a customer that lives on a terrace of houses with parking outside the front door may take 3 minutes, as opposed 15 minutes to a customer that wants the same groceries but lives on the top of a 20 story block of flats. A plan that takes these nuances into account by using data on the type of building, for example, will be more efficient and cheaper to run than a plan that doesn’t.

3 – Road Type

Thirdly, to get to customers’ homes, delivery vehicles are likely to need to travel on the most minor of roads, navigate narrow country lanes and travel to the ends of cul-de-sacs. This may sound obvious, but the level of mapping data needed to underpin such an operation cannot be taken for granted. Often mapping data doesn’t include these minor roads and drivers can find themselves high and dry, needing to ask a friendly local to find the right place.

4 – Vehicle Type

Fourthly, home delivery vehicles are typically not cars and range from small vans up to medium sized trucks. All roads cannot accommodate all vehicles, as for example tall vehicles cannot go under low bridges, wide vehicles can’t get down narrow lanes, heavy trucks can’t go over weak bridges, and long vehicles need a large turning circle. There are also legal restrictions to consider, such as one-way streets, lanes reserved for public transport and banned right turns.

Many mapping solutions, including Google, are designed for cars and so this data doesn’t cater for any of these restrictions.

5 – Road Speeds

Fifthly, commercial vehicles typically drive at different speeds to cars, road speeds are affected by the time of day and speeds differ depending on the location of the road (in fact every road has unique traffic patterns). Planning routes without an understanding of the speeds that can be expected for roads that are required to drive down, the vehicles being used, at the right time of day can result in vehicles getting snarled up a traffic jams and late customer deliveries at worst, but will almost definitely result in less efficient routes which will cost more money to fulfil.

For More Information

All companies have different requirements and require solutions that are right for their setup. CACI logistics has worked for over 30 years in this field, developing solutions to address all of these problems (and many more).

We love nothing more than discussing which data products are most suitable to resolve our customers’ problems. Please contact us for more information.

Field Force value optimisation for convenience

Posted on: 2 February 2021

The Latest Analytics Techniques to Underpin ROI Are Now Accessible

Field Force Value Optimisation means operating your field sales team in the most focused and effective way to maximise sales performance and ROI. These are basic principles that every leader and manager selling brands to the convenience sector strives to meet.

Convenience is a growing channel: reps are highly influential in driving sales performance and brands want their share of the opportunity. But with so many variables and in a rapidly changing world, it’s no simple matter to route the right rep at the right time to the right location.

Different products will perform well in different locations – we all know this.

We’re going to explain how it’s now possible to influence retailers effectively by using the latest data and analytics to compete cost-effectively in the convenience channel. It’s about targeting reps to the stores where they will have the greatest impact on sales, knowing which product lines or promotion to push in that store, using accurate predictive models to size the local shopper opportunity and ultimately prioritising where reps spend their time.

Traditional Approaches Don’t Deliver the Best ROI

Historically, most field reps drive a regular route around their territory, aiming to cover every convenience store once in each weekly, fortnightly or monthly cycle, (occasionally making a promotionally led deviation.) While this is great for maintaining contact, oversight and relationships, it doesn’t concentrate resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales.

Reps can make a big difference in underperforming stores, by helping to diagnose and correct issues that are slowing sales. Armed with trustworthy evidence, they can unlock valuable new opportunities by showing store managers how they can increase sales with new products, promotions and ranges that are right for their customers.

There’s a two-fold challenge here. You need to be able to generate realistically driveable routes in response to changing needs. But before that, you need to know where underperformance and opportunity may lie, and what it’s worth in sales and ROI terms to address it.

New, Rich Data Gives a Clear Picture of Opportunities in Each Territory

In convenience, we don’t have the luxury of detailed EPOS data to compare performance between similar outlets or to spot trends from historic data. Catchment information can be useful for opportunity-spotting, but it’s a blunt instrument: it only shows you who lives and works near the store, without any indication of where they shop, their dwell time, peak demand periods, seasonality or how any of their needs and preferences are evolving.

But now there is an alternative. Rich datasets and powerful analytics tools are now available for brand owners and field sales operators to evaluate store performance and opportunity, segmenting them into meaningful categories and revealing changing consumer behaviours and habits that influence demand in the convenience channel.

This data insight allows you to understand the relative importance and absolute value of the stores in a territory. Ultimately, you can calculate the ROI of sending a rep into a particular store.

Real-Time Local Consumer Behaviour Data

Building on our experience working with a range of convenience retailers, we use a wide range of datasets to understand what drives the potential of a location. This ranges from our purpose-built datasets to describe the function and role of different locations, competitor information and detailed insight into local demographics. Using this we can identify the raw potential for different products.

Our latest addition, anonymised mobile data allows us to understand who is in an area, by time of day and build a picture of why they are there. This provides unique insight into what role the store is serving and its consumers, and therefore the sales potential for different products.

By modelling different scenarios based on this data, we can show what value is generated by more or less frequent visits by a rep to different types of outlet. We can factor in the costs relating to drivetime and mileage. We can prioritise outlets for visits by ranking the ROI potential.

For more remote convenience stores, there may be a big sales opportunity but the cost and time to visit is disproportionate. Brands and field team managers can make an evidence-based decision about whether and how often to send reps or whether alternative methods of communication and influence, such as telesales, would be more profitable.

How to Access the Evidence You Need to Optimise Your Field Force ROI

These new datasets and analytics show an up-to-date picture of opportunities and performance gaps by convenience outlet and reveal the profitability of rep visits. They show change as it happens, so you can plan resources and adjust visit schedules to address current priorities. The mix of instore and external data creates a detailed and accurate profile for any convenience store. This gives the manager added value from the rep and confidence to follow recommendations.

These rich data analytics for field force optimisation are available now. And you don’t need in-house data scientists to access them. Talk to the CACI team to find out how we can help you exploit focused insight to understand and improve the ROI of your field team and enhance sales performance.

The value of field sales consultancy in an ever changing world

Posted on: 26 January 2021

Using the Right Tools

Many businesses embarking on a journey to optimise their field sales teams have a defined strategy for the task. They understand what is required and how they can achieve their business’s goals. But what they don’t have is the right tool to make that strategy work and to achieve their business goals.

However, when you’ve been given a set of objectives to achieve without an action-oriented strategy to support you, it gets a little tricky. You have an idea of the broad direction in which you would like to head but your strategy lacks the data-driven and methodical approach to guarantee success. In plain terms, you’re working in the dark.

How do you really know what success looks like? How do you measure getting things right? How do you compare options, when manually creating just one version of the ‘future’ can take a day or two?

How do you deliver the goals that have been set out? And how do you know that your solution to that goal is the most efficient, and not just one of many possibilities?

That’s where our Field Force Planning consultancy services come into play.

Consultancy

CACI consultants provide a valuable partnership, whether you license our tools or not. Many of the consultancy projects we deliver are where companies choose not to go down the software route due to the resource, timescales, or lack of internal expertise.

Manually attempting to recut territories can take weeks, if not months of resource, time and effort. And when you lack the resource or expertise in-house, outsourcing the work to CACI can be just the right option.

We expertly guide clients to define an action plan and then work to execute that impartially and agilely.

The Biggest Benefit for Mondelez International from the Use of CACI is the Ability to Translate Our Strategic Plan Into a Concrete Action Plan.

Impartiality

Impartiality is key to the success of many of our projects. Some of the toughest emotional changes you must make when managing a field sales team, especially as we endure a global pandemic and businesses are looking at cost saving, are around downsizing or merging teams.

Having those difficult decisions taken out of your hands gives you objectivity and security in knowing that you made the right call and ensures that every decision point is transparent and fair.

Watch this space for an upcoming blog post about making structural changes to your field sales teams.

An Objective Third Party

Last year, one of our clients had a very detailed field sales territory reorganisation to tackle, which involved the merging of two large teams into a single team, and a reduction in headcount.

As a long-standing partner, we understood the sensitive, delicate nature of the project and the amount of change that the reorganisation would require. We helped them understand exactly how big the new team should be to achieve their RTM strategy and how staff could be assigned new territories in the fairest way.

This required a level of transparency and data-led decision-making only possible through an objective third party and sophisticated optimisation tools.

A project such as this is highly sensitive and requires a certain amount of discretion. Our consultants are experts in utilising the data and technology required to deliver the project in an impartial and professional manner. By leveraging the Field Force Planning team’s expertise, our client was able to remove any bias and make decisions validated by data, not emotion.

Is a Self-Service Approach the Most Effective Option?

Alongside the complexity of the project, there can be several reasons why you would choose a consultancy project rather than a self-service approach.

Ultimately, consultative expertise can enable increased flexibility, compartmentalisation of multiple projects and take away the pain of difficult decision-making (read more about this here).

CACI will be able to challenge your assumptions of your project and make sure you are able to define a workable, achievable strategy to measure the success of your project.

Nestlé Australia, worked with the team at CACI, initially on a consultancy basis, to perform two major pieces of work (view our customer story here).

I had the opportunity of working closely with the team at CACI on a large project that lasted over six months…the results have been extremely positive, highlighting how we can do more with less when we operate a lean and efficient team. With the expertise that we have developed, we are now using the software…to drive further efficiencies through our non-grocery business.

Speak to an Expert

At CACI we help teams with field force management on a daily basis, and over the past 30 years we’ve worked with organisations all over the world to add transparency and certainty to this balancing act.

Get in touch with us here to leverage the expertise of our consultants the next time you reorganise your territories or if you’d like to find out more about our Field Force Planning consultancy services.

Adapting to change in your community: Lifesaving data for fire and rescue services

Posted on: 25 January 2021

Understanding Data

To Judge the Reliability of Community Insight and analysis reports, it’s vital to understand the difference between the types of data they’re based on.

Data is a valuable resource for public service providers who want to understand the communities they serve and provide the most effective communication and support to meet their needs. For Fire and Rescue Services (FRS), analysis of information about residents, the local area, types of incidents and causes can help make protection and prevention services even more effective.

But not all data is equal. How do you know whether it is up-to-date and accurate? Does it cover every household and area? What is missing? It could make a big difference to the effectiveness of decision-making and service provision if the information you’re relying on is old, doesn’t include everything you need or is not detailed and specific enough.

In this blog we explain what different types of data are, so you know how and when to use and trust them. Understanding of the pros and cons of each type of data will give you a strong foundation for building a blended data approach that allows for a greater level of insight than ever before.

Open Data

This data is official and since it’s on the Open Government Licence, free. There are limitations: sources are rarely measured at low-level geographies, and they can be several years out of date. It’s several years since the last census: it’s almost certain that new homes been built and parts of the community have changed in that time.

Open data sources, such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Home Office, are ideal for building a top-level picture of your communities. But it doesn’t provide a detailed and complete view. At best, the data is usually presented at Output Area level (around 100 households.) This means at-risk residents can be hidden – not ideal when you’re trying to target limited resources towards those who need it most.

Open data is an important starting point. But it’s seldom fit for purpose in its raw form. It needs to be blended with other, complementary data sources.

Administrative Data

This is the data you collect internally. Its value lies in its uniqueness to your FRS. Everything you collect, from Home Safety Visit data to fire incident information, is specific to your community, which means it’s highly relevant and frequently updated.

There are some limitations. Not every resident within the community interacts with your service, so there are many people and households you have no data for. People at future risk may be excluded.
Sharing administrative data between departments and colleagues is often subject to strict governance regulations which can make it harder to use. Your compliance or legal team will need to check that data is being used in a way that’s compatible with the purposes it was collected for.

Your own administrative data provides a detailed snapshot of part of your community. In conjunction with open data, segmentation and other commercial sources, it has the potential to provide a deeper level of insight.

Commercial Data

Commercial datasets draw from a variety of frequently updated sources to paint a picture of your community today. Commercial data allows for easy segmentation at a household and postcode level, for a detailed level of information. You get a deeper understanding of lifestyle and demographic characteristics right across your community.

Information from a commercial dataset provides scale and granularity. It can offer insight that open and administrative data lacks, revealing factors such as online activity, engagement, channel preferences, behavioural and lifestyle characteristics.

You have to pay for commercial datasets. So you’ll want to be sure you’re getting value for money. Check that the data is up-to-date, regularly refreshed and doesn’t exclude any part of your community. Find out how detailed the coverage is: do you get information by postcode or household?

Health and Wellbeing Data

For FRS, it’s valuable to know about the health and wellbeing status of community members, in order to prioritise the most vulnerable and at-risk residents for home safety visits.

Wellbeing segmentation is a commercial dataset that’s unique to CACI. It gives insight into potential factors which may lead to an increase in certain residents being more at risk or vulnerable. This means your FRS can effectively allocate resources for community outreach and service provision.

The CACI health and wellbeing dataset helps you identify residents who are elderly, socially isolated or have health dependencies at household level.

Postcode and Household Data

Postcode segmentation reflects the mix of people within a postcode and so focuses on describing the very local neighbourhood. For a FRS, postcode segmentation can identify the types and frequency of fires that happen in a given area, helping to inform general preventative initiatives.

Household segmentation places more emphasis on individual household attributes such as tenure, family structure and lifestage. This level of segmentation helps your FRS identify individual, at-risk people in otherwise safe postcodes. It’s this specific analysis that gives you visibility of all residents and helps you engage with them in effective ways tailored to their needs and capabilities.

If you’d like to find out more about blending different types of data to achieve the focused level of insight that your FRS needs for prevention, engagement and protection, click here to talk to CACI’s FRS data team.