Channel Collaboration and Information Partnership - P&g

Channel Collaboration and Information Partnership

P&G’s Corporate Reporting System was developed based on the market and geographic

structure used by the 12 product divisions. All sales reports were designed so P&G could track

the amount of product (e.g., laundry detergent) sold in the Western part of the country, however,

they did not have a system capable of reporting total product sales by customer. A system

needed to be developed to track sales by customers. Once this system was developed tracking

sales by customers was possible.

P&G’s shipment data proved helpful in understanding how much business was sold to

Wal-Mart. Some of the questions Wal-Mart had were:

(1) How much of the product was sold at stores last year?

(2) How many customers bought P&G products?

(3) What was the profitability of these products for both P&G and Wal-Mart?

These were real questions that needed to be answered. The infrastructure that was needed to link

P&G’s data with Wal-Mart’s data proved to be a critical step in understanding the consumer’s

needs. Wal-Mart was just coming online with a new data warehouse that allowed them to track

sales of all products in each of their stores. P&G and Wal-Mart jointly developed a data

highway that linked P&G data to Wal-Mart data driving down costs and sharing information to

meet the consumer’s needs.

The data highway concept (Figure 3) was straightforward, Wal-Mart had scanners in all

of their stores to track, measure and analyze their business. Wal-Mart collected its own data then

analyzed the results. P&G also had data about the consumer which was used to make product

decisions. Why did she/he prefer a certain product or go to a certain store to buy diapers for