Athena’s Journey®: Wise Athena’s Blueprint for Success
As a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, you want to ensure that your business decisions around pricing and trade promotions are informed and effective. That’s why Wise Athena has created Athena, a comprehensive and cutting-edge predictive tool that implements AI and ML to optimize pricing and trade promotions for CPGs.
At Wise Athena, we understand that the success of any business tool depends not only on its technical capabilities but also on its implementation process. That’s why we have developed Athena’s Journey®, a proprietary value-generation process that complements the power of our predictive tool, Athena.
With Athena and Athena’s Journey®, CPG companies can achieve sustained revenue growth and competitive advantage.
Step 1: Pre-Kick-off Call
The process begins with a pre-kick-off call between our team and your company’s team. This call plays a crucial role in defining and confirming the scope, business rules, business objectives, roles, and responsibilities in your company. It helps to establish a clear understanding of your business goals and how Wise Athena’s process can support them.
The Pre-Kick-off Call process of Wise Athena is designed to carefully consider the timing and scheduling aspect to ensure seamless alignment and fulfilling your expectations.
All CPGs have different rules and restrictions. Some of the business rules and operational constraints that we need to understand include defining delivery schedules is a common concern among CPG, with scenarios such as “I need to send my promotional grid to the retailer 3 months in advance, is that possible considering that my internal process takes an additional 15 days?” or “Can I have six months of predictions ahead of time?” among others. With the Pre-Kick-off Call, Wise Athena proactively addresses these questions to be able to propose the best way of working to meet your specific requirements.
In addition to the proper construction of the predictive model that will enable the optimization of Trade Promotions or the proper increase in prices, this first stage is extremely important as it lays the foundation for a successful collaboration. By thoroughly discussing and confirming the details of your business, we can ensure that the solution we provide is tailored to meet your specific needs and achieve your company’s goals.
The following key questions should be answered during this stage:
- What are the specific business objectives of the CPG?
- What are the specific constraints, limitations, and risks that need to be considered?
- What are the roles and responsibilities of each team member involved?
4. What data sources will be used and what are the peculiarities of that data?
5. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure the success of the collaboration?
6. What are the key milestones and timelines?
Step 2: Data Cleansing, Harmonization, and Structure and Model Training
Next, the Service Delivery team initiates the data ingestion process. Different data sets are cleaned, structured, and harmonized so that they can be used to train the machine learning and predictive models. With award-winning data management, you can trust that your data is being handled with the utmost care.
Step 3: Athena Setup and Certification
The Customer Success team provides expert training and certification for the Athena setup, ensuring optimal results. With their guidance, you can be confident that you’re getting the most out of the Athena tool.
Step 4: Generation of Custom Scenarios
In collaboration with your assigned Customer Success Manager, you and our customer success manager assigned to your account will generate custom pricing and trade promotion scenarios, based on your unique business objectives. With their support, you can make informed decisions that align with your goals.
Step 5: Ongoing Assessment and Review
Wise Athena’s commitment to success extends beyond implementation with ongoing monthly assessments and quarterly business reviews. This helps you to measure performance and maximize your ROI from the Athena tool and Wise Athena’s team of experts.
One of our unique and signature processes is the Post-Event Methodology Analysis from Wise Athena®. Through this approach, we can analyze the effectiveness of our predictive tool’s recommendations, while also identifying new opportunities for manufacturers to refine their pricing strategy. The methodology comprises four distinct stages that are applied to every manufacturer’s specific business case, allowing us to thoroughly analyze and evaluate results.
Our team of experts carefully compares data from a selected period, either the previous month or the same period from the previous year, to the current data in order to validate the effectiveness of our predictive tool. By examining Total Volume, Sales, Margin, ROI, and Investment, we are able to provide deep insights into the manufacturer’s business case and recommend strategies to help them achieve sustainable growth.
Step 6: Data Ingestion and Model Retraining
The data ingestion and model retraining process ensures that the predictions and new deliveries are always accurate and up to date with category trends and overall performance. This allows you to stay ahead of the competition and make the best decisions for your business.
Conclusion:
By partnering with Wise Athena’s team of experts and harnessing the power of their AI-powered Athena tool with machine learning-driven predictive models, CPG companies can gain a decisive advantage in their industry. Here are the top three benefits of applying this process to your business decisions:
- Customized Solutions: With custom pricing and trade promotion scenarios based on your unique business objectives, you can make informed decisions that align with your goals.
- Expert Support: The Customer Success team provides expert training and support, ensuring that you’re getting the most out of the Athena tool.
- Ongoing Assessment and Review: With monthly assessments and quarterly business reviews, you can measure performance and maximize your ROI from the Athena tool and Wise Athena’s team of experts.
You too can take advantage of WiseAthena’s AI-powered machine-learning platform that helps CPGs make agile pricing and trade promotion decisions.
Write us at info@wiseathena.com to schedule your demo now!
