Cashing in on Improved Profitability through Pattern Detection and Big Data Analytics

NCR Corporation is a global, computer hardware and electronics company that sells self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check processing systems, bar-code scanners, and business consumables. It is also a solutions company, selling total solutions in the retail, financial, travel, telecom and technology, and hospitality industries. The company has a product line of more than 150,000 uniquely order-able products offered in more than 130 countries.

Extreme SKU proliferation created long customer lead-times and a time-consuming sales quoting process. With thousands of different product choices, salespeople and customers had to contend with endless options, often leading to a pricing war and expensive, custom product builds. Due to a lack of a unified view and insight into their data, the organization suffered the following challenges: A reactive approach to the market due to a disconnect between product management, sales and the supply chain. An incomplete view of customer buying patterns and a lack of, multi-dimensional sales analytics. Data was stored in separate data warehouses and existing tools were not designed to unify or optimize the data accordingly. Guesswork and process inefficiency in sales due to a disconnect between the sales funnel and the ordering system. For example, each unique proposal entailed 38 steps and about 30 minutes to create a single configuration file. The qualitative impacts of all of these factors resulted in lost sales, slow response time, reduced sales efficiency, long lead times, and more. Product variety equated to millions of dollars in wasted productivity. NCR knew that the information contained in their data, such as customer buying patterns, is the life blood of their company, but the question was how to bring it together. NCR needed a way to gain a unified view into their data to more accurately sense and shape demand and apply that intelligence across Sales, Operations, and Solutions Management. They sought a simple way to improve visibility into their product offerings to ensure they were selling the right product to meet customer needs, improve profitability and accelerate commission payments.

NCR chose Emcien because it’s software could analyze unstructured product data in the context of sales, marketing, design, finance and operations. Additionally, NCR had a goal shape demand toward the use of high volume product configurations and to use guided selling, instead of just reacting to demand. Mike Groesch, NCR’s VP of Sales and Operations Planning, and Kate Lisska, NCR’s director of sales operations, realized that the Emcien approach would break down the walls of functional silos that are an impediment to the entire product development process, from product planning to building to selling and then delivering the final product to the customer. “We saw this is an opportunity to bring three disparate departments together onto one tool set,” said Mike Groesch, VP of Sales and Operations Planning, NCR Corp. “The idea of Solutions Management, Sales and Operations together in one environment to enhance the performance of our new product introduction, improve our sales enablement, and to give the supply chain a better demand signal was really compelling.” “Emcien provides information on actions we need to take – right out of the box – which is superior to business intelligence tools,” said Groesch. Solutions managers now leverage Emcien’s pattern detection platform to identify connections in customer-buying patterns, reveal exactly which product configurations customers are actually buying, determine the most popular feature combinations by market segment and then optimize the product mix accordingly. This enables solution managers to reduce the number of product offerings while continuing to meet customer demand. This type of Big-Data-driven intelligence arms Operations with the insight required to build products more cost-effectively with shorter leadtimes. Solutions managers then push optimal product configurations to the sales force in real-time. “The actionable nature of the Emcien solution set was really compelling,” said Groesch. “Emcien provides us with a systemic way to communicate with Sales in the way that Sales would respond to, quite simply.” Sales can guide customers more quickly and seamlessly to the configurations that offer the best blend of features, lead-time and price for their needs.

• NCR realized improved product and cycle planning, moving from anecdotal evidence to Big Data-driven analysis that reveals which configurations best satisfy the market most profitably.
• According to Lisska, these changes save time that sales people can now spend prospecting, selling and building customer relationships. “They have a better understanding of what to present,” says Lisska, “and therefore a better ability to present the entire solution – meaning better up-sell potential. Putting time back into salespeople’s days translates into higher top line growth for us.”
• To understand the opportunity cost at NCR, consider the typical salesperson: He or she has a $4 million dollar quota and spends 10.5% of her time defining the solution, configuring and pricing it, and then tracking delivery. Reducing that time by just 1% for a 100–person sales force represents an opportunity cost of $42 million.
• And Lisska says she expects Emcien’s solution is “reducing the time required for a salesperson to generate a quote from 30 minutes to 10. In total, our improved ability to shape demand is saving us around 5% of a sales person’s time per year.” Applying the opportunity cost analysis above, Emcien is creating an estimated $110 million impact at NCR.

• 5% improvement in sales efficiency
• Estimated $110 million contribution to NCR’s top line