Background & Challenge
Premier Brands of America is a world-class manufacturer and packager based in White Plains, NY. Premier makes a suite of over 125 first aid, foot care, and skin care products including sprays, powders, moisturizers, callus removers, insoles, and more.
Since Premier’s products are sold at most major retail outlets in the US (CVS, Walmart, etc.), there are sales data from dozens of products, hundreds of distributors, and thousands of stores. Sorting through this data to dive deeper into sales and SKU profitability over time is a challenge. Furthermore, Premier’s various brands often experience trends that are difficult to forecast. This is important because Premier’s management wants to make sure their products are always available to customers and properly stocked on the shelves of their retailers’ stores.
Solution
Premier had no cloud analytics platform to date, so Keyrus set up an account in the AWS cloud to begin the cloud journey. We then set up a DirectConnect VPN from the cloud to their on-premise network to load data from the on-prem SQL databases. In QuickSight’s Spice backend, we cleaned up the data for modest data quality considerations (trailing spaces, number formatting, etc.) to be fully ready for dashboarding analyses.
With that data, Keyrus made a QuickSight dashboard that can analyze any key attribute by any key metric with just a few clicks from the end user. Key metrics included quantity, average price, and total sales while key attributes included products and hierarchies, product types (over the counter, pharmacy, etc.), brands, customers, and geographical areas.
Using these interactive functionalities, the Premier team can make a few selections to drill into an area of interest and then view the QuickSight Insights, which provide automated contextual analyses of the top movers by the selected metric. This becomes the starting point to drill in deeper and analyze what is recently driving the growth or decline of products and brands.
Results
As a result, the Premier IT team and management end users now have a much easier way to dive into their data. Rather than weekly analyses that take a few hours each to put together, there are fresh data, insights, and visualizations daily that allow Premier to take action sooner, especially with negatively trending merchandise and when watching products with recent price increases.
“We were impressed with how quickly Keyrus was able to leverage QuickSight to give us dramatically improved visibility into Premier’s data. This new visibility, complete with analyses and trend spotting, continuously has been helping us make better business decisions on a daily basis. Seeing where demand is spiking or lagging on a granular level is helping our supply chain team plan orders and our sales team decide the direction of our SKU offerings.” - Alexander Corsun, President & COO of Premier Brands.
About Keyrus & AWS Analytics
Keyrus is a global consultancy specializing in building modern analytics platforms in the cloud. We are an Advanced Tier AWS Consulting partner with over 20 certifications, three accredited service delivery programs (EC2 for Windows Server, Service Catalog, and Redshift) and are part of two partner programs (Solution Provider and Public Sector). Keyrus’ QuickSight Service Delivery Program helps clients leverage QuickSight to see tangible business results.
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