CPG companies from around the world joined together in San Antonio, Texas to affirm their passions for the value of Salient’s Margin Minder® as an incomparable performance management system for every manager to drive consistent enterprise growth.
Participating companies on the main stage included Julius Meinl Coffee, Pabst Brewing Co., North State Grocery, New Belgium Brewing, as well as senior lecturer from MIT, Steven Spear, PhD, who delivered the keynote speech. Salient client speakers shared stories of innovation, new achievements, and how they’re harnessing Margin Minder’s speed, precision and ease of use to cultivate continuous improvement throughout their companies.
Scroll below to view excerpts from this year’s lineup of presentations, including Salient’s unveiling of the upcoming release, Salient CIS7.
Steve Spear, PhD, Keynote Address
Steve Spear, a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s management and engineering schools and noted author of The High Velocity Edge provided an insight filled keynote address to open the conference.
Steve’s extensive research into a diverse business landscape enabled him to demonstrate the need to have a “dynamic discovery” system in every organization that facilitates high speed learning and creates a culture of innovation and improvement. Attendees heard multiple examples of how this type of management system ensures positive and measurable results for the long-term.
Steve’s powerful message set the stage for a day filled with creative idea sharing.
In the Salient Spotlight: Dashboards Advanced Capabilities
Jim McDermott, VP of Strategic Business Unit, and Helmut Bubestinger, Senior Business Consultant, demonstrated capabilities of Salient Dashboards 6.20 including new charting types, custom ranking on multiple metrics, applying conditional logic across multiple metrics to flag or recommend adjustments, and full customization of dashboard themes.
New Belgium Brewing Deploys Margin Minder Embedded in Mobile CRM, Creating a Data-Driven Salesforce Nationwide
Ryan Van Fleet who leads New Belgium’s analytics and planning group was joined by his colleague, Jessica Schleiger who leads all CRM projects and initiatives. Together, they offered invaluable new insights for every attendee.
Steering a data-driven salesforce, New Belgium’s team has embedded Margin Minder dashboards directly into their mobile CRM system that is universally used to ensure overwhelming product adoption and set up long-term success.
With this approach, they have created a single source of management information that drives consistent results, improves accountability and enhances overall enterprise value.
The New Belgium team clearly displays the value of harnessing data from multiple sources including sales, supply chain, finance, CRM, depletions, and points of distribution to deliver a clearer picture of enterprise performance.
Unveiling Salient CIS7: Easier. Faster. More Powerful.
Jim McDermott and Justin Russell, Chief Technology Officer unveiled the upcoming release of Salient’s technology, the Continuous Improvement Suite 7 (CIS7), demonstrating the fully redesigned desktop and dashboard interfaces that now let users see even more at once to quickly identify value drivers.
New capabilities demonstrated include new graphing and charting options, updated navigational menus, enhancements to security including new encryption options, and user activity reporting.
Pabst Brewing Co. Precisely Targets Consumers with Margin Minder
Alexandra (Allie) Bishop-Counts, Senior Manager of Sales Analytics at Pabst Brewing Co. led a fascinating discussion about how she and her team use Margin Minder to understand the full spectrum of Pabst sales activity across the country.
Allie showed how Margin Minder provides heightened visibility of Nielsen Spectra information and allows business users to quickly explore and zoom into different levels of consumer data. This level of detail gives Pabst valuable information that allows them to precisely target new product placements down to individual store locations; aiming to drastically improve sales outcomes.
North State Grocery uses Margin Minder as “Night Vision” for Business Performance
Richie Morgan, CEO of North State Grocery, showed how an independent grocer in today’s competitive retail landscape can gain a competitive advantage over much larger competitors when you incorporate customer loyalty insights into Margin Minder. Richie Morgan’s mantra for North State Grocery is always customer first.
He demonstrated how, by using Margin Minder, he can tap into customer loyalty data collected at the point of sale and quickly identify who his most loyal shoppers are, and ensure their loyalty by avoiding removing the SKUs his key customer buy.
Additionally, these loyalty insights afford him the opportunity to re-engage customers who have stopped or reduced shopping at his locations with targeted offers to return. Margin Minder® allows Richie’s team to spend less money on broad discounting tactics and drive better results through precision targeting of discounts to key customers. This strategy clearly demonstrated that a smaller independent or co-op of independent retail players in the market, if armed with precise information, can still win against the big players.
Julius Meinl Coffee Group Delivers Coherency of Performance Across the Globe
An international user of Margin Minder, Martin Thurner, CIO of the Julius Meinl Coffee Group took the stage with his associate Silvia Belloro who leads the implementation and training for Margin Minder at all Julius Meinl subsidiaries throughout Europe and across the globe.
Together, they demonstrated how their need for a technology platform that can deliver a coherent and accurate picture of all key aspects of business activity including customer level profitability, ROI on critical capital investment projects, and every dimension of sales activity has been satisfied by Margin Minder.
Martin and Silvia described how Julius Meinl successfully deploys Margin Minder across diverse countries, languages, and currencies and still delivers an actionable 360 degree view of all critical market activities to users with global and local responsibilities.
