Lexia Analytics: Enabling Consumer Goods Businesses to Leverage Data to Drive Insights

Big data made its way into the business sphere during the early phase of 21st century and the first ones to practice and implement it were online businesses and start-ups. In the last few years, many businesses globally have recognised big data as an opportunity and have been initiating major investments to make the best use of it. By leveraging big data, these businesses haven’t just ensured better decision making for enhanced customer experience but have also achieved more targeted marketing and reduced costs.

However, particularly in less developed markets, too many companies have to date not been able to capitalise on the rich commercial data they have. Their ongoing challenge remains how to convert the various data sources they manage into commercial insights that actively drive day-to-day decision making. This is where Lexia Analytics, a commercial analytics company steps in with the desired help. The company enables businesses to successfully leverage the wide spectrum of information sources to create actual insights that drive practical commercial value (eg which 20 percent of customer investment should we stop doing or which customer segment should we target with which mechanic and how frequent).

Lexia Analytics was founded in 2007 on the insight that consumer goods companies spent a lot of money on discounts, rebates and other pricing mechanisms and had limited control and understanding of the efficiency and effectiveness of this expenditure. To address the issue, the company emerged to help consumer goods businesses to help them identify the availability of data and provided the desired support to connect the dots. Lexia brought two software solutions for its customers to address these issues. These were Lexia TPM and Lexia Customer Profitability Module.

While Lexia TPM enabled its clients to manage their promotional spend end-to-end and optimise customer investment, the Customer Profitability Module enabled them to track their customer profitability at brand and (often) at outlet level to understand how the quantum of investment is distributed. More often than not, simply providing full line-of-sight of the customer profitability at a granular level drives significant savings and a change in commercial focus. Along with these software solutions, the organization also provides consulting services leveraging its understanding of the Asian Consumer Goods landscape ranging from trading term transformations to sales force effectiveness and on-going pricing analytics. Lexia’s vision is to deliver impact by ensuring that the interrogation of data and the insights derived from it lead to practical commercial improvements. Jelle de Jong, Director, Lexia Analytics adds, “Our core strength lies in our capability to combine deep technological and analytical know-how with a practical understanding of how our clients’ commercial operations function.” The company has amassed a clientele including the likes of Pernod-Ricard, Friesland-Campina, Treasury Wine Estates, Diageo, Bacardi, McWilliam’s Wines, Accolade Wines, Foster’s, Merck and numerous others. For most of these clients they have been able to deliver a 5-10 percent saving in the amount they invest through discounts and trading terms with their customers through their analytics work.

“Lexia’s vision is to deliver impact by ensuring that the interrogation of data and the insights derived from it lead to practical commercial improvements.”

Over the years, Lexia has also expanded its array of solutions by developing Data Blending solutions and an On-Premise Investment module (focused on alcoholic drinks companies) to the market. At the moment, the company is all set to launch a first-to-world cloud-based customer trade promotion management solution called LexiaLite. This new solution is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses for which conventional TPM solutions are too expensive and the implementation too cumber some. “LexiaLite is the first solution out there that can be operational within a 4-6 week time frame and for less than 10 percent of the cost of the conventional solutions out there” is Lexia’s promise to its future clients. Finally, “2017 will be the year when we’ll actively start building our business in Europe as we see a lot of opportunity there for our lighter and more agile solutions,” indicates Jelle.