CSG Facilitates Market Domination By A 3500+ Member Cooperative
“The data warehouse solution offered the market decision capabilities, driven by access to organization-wide sales, product and customer information that was previously wasted by being held in individual store silos.”
Situation
As the largest retail company in its field, our client – a privately held cooperative with over 3500 store locations – has experienced incredible growth since its foundation in 1984. But keeping pace with this growth hasn’t been without its challenges.
The cooperative’s stated mission is clear: to provide continuously evolving tools to help its retailers maximize operational efficiencies and achieve success. In addition to this, it also aims to maximize the returns of the cooperative business itself.
At CSG we have been helping this co-op overcome scaling challenges and achieve its stated goals for a decade, during which time we’ve designed, constructed and delivered an array of custom solutions.
The Problem? This client has had to navigate the difficulties that come with providing resources, innovation and scaling opportunities to such a large number of members. It has also had to provide the above in an ever broader way – while initially focused on a single market (which it quickly came to dominate), it has since expanded its operations to include over 10 other industries.
In order to achieve the mission outlined in its charter, the company knew it needed to provide an improved solution set to the cooperative’s affiliated members, franchisees and licensees.
Our primary client contacts were the co-op’s technology leader and its head of product and rebates. Their customers were the cooperative’s affiliated members, franchisees, and licensees – the 3,500+ independent business owners with brick and mortar retail stores.
Solution
Keeping the stated mission of our client front of mind, we at CSG were able to evolve the cooperative’s business tools over the course of a decade, by architecting, designing and building several solutions designed to both support cooperative members and the cooperative itself.
Solutions designed for cooperative members (the retail stores) included:
A lead management solution that captured leads from the websites of individual stores. The right notifications were provided to the right sales employees, who were able to access the solution via online and mobile applications.
A sales, product and customer data warehouse solution that enabled analysis and insight generation across all member stores. The solution utilized an adapter capable of drawing information from hundreds of in-store point of sale systems. Information was then translated and integrated into a data warehouse, which laid the foundation for cutting-edge analysis and reporting functionality. Ongoing enhancements enabled advanced analyses and decision support.
Solutions designed for the cooperative business included:
A rebate tracking solution that facilitated significant cost savings by tracking purchases and ensuring any appropriate supplier-agreed rebates were applied.
A product information management system that enabled analysis of a greater range of product and costing information, which helped to guide the co-op in making key purchasing and resell pricing decisions.
Result
The results of CSG’s efforts were seen in the growth of the cooperative. Both the cooperative itself and the retail stores that it serves have gone from strength to strength over the last decade, bolstered in no small part by the cost savings and smarter strategic growth decisions facilitated by our solutions.
The resulting efficiencies were obvious. The rebate tracking system reduced spend and leveraged the cooperative’s unmatched purchasing power. The lead management solution offered cost savings that the legacy sales CRM simply couldn’t, as well as delivering functionality that perfectly fit the client’s needs.
Growth too was spurred on. Our data warehouse solution offered the co-op enhanced market decision capabilities, driven by access to organization-wide sales, product and customer information that was previously wasted by being held in individual store silos. Insights were deeper and easier to generate than ever before. Analysis of lead-to-sales conversions led to the optimization of sales actions and lead routing, while intelligent product purchase and resale pricing models utilized both internal and external data, maximizing profit.
A complex business, our client’s choices directly affect over 3500 individual businesses. But thankfully, with the help of CSG, the solution decisions made over the last 10 years have proven to be wise ones, setting members, franchisees and licensees up for unbridled success.
