Business Researchers, Inc.

Direct Marketing Planning and Reporting System

An Oracle database backend with Excel front-end eliminates errors from standardized reports and reduces time for sales reporting more than 3,600%.

The Background

Each of the multiple channels direct marketers manage, such as retail, email, and direct mail, comes with its own unique metrics and bottom line impacts. As a result, identifying the most effective multi-channel marketing mix is time consuming and data intensive.

The Challenge

The direct marketing team tracked and reported campaign results using legacy mainframe reports, manual copy and paste to manipulate data and multiple complex spreadsheet templates. The manual intervention made tracking and reporting time consuming and error-prone, with little audit control and no centralized data repository. Further complicating their process, the organization lacked a standard reporting process across departments. They brought in Business Researchers to standardize weekly sales reports.

The Solution

After analyzing the situation, Business Researchers quickly realized that standardizing weekly sales reports was insufficient to meet the organization’s needs, and recommended developing a planning and reporting application that worked off of a centralized database to capture, manage and measure data.

Working closely with the client project team, a phased development plan was put into place taking into account short-term and long-term goals. Because the immediate need was to streamline weekly reports, this was the first deliverable. Concurrently, Business Researchers created a database and application design that would create a foundation for future development. This included:

  • Creation of a central data repository to store planning and sales data and metrics
  • Creation of a standardized planning and reporting process across departments
  • Automating the collection and presentation of data
  • Redesign the planning process to incorporate multiple marketing channels
  • Design an intuitive, easy to use application interface

Business Researchers delivered an Oracle database backend, designed to store planning and data/metrics, which was implemented using technology already utilized by the client—requiring zero cash outlay for the development platform. Users interacted with the database using a familiar Excel application interface, which provided easy integration of output with other parts of the business.

Additionally, Business Researchers developed a suite of products over three phases of development. These included:

  • Campaign setup and meta data capture tool
  • Planning Application, which allows users to plan sales, order, costs and circulation data for a campaign, model the data and then generate resulting profit margin reports. All of the users work in the tool is captured and stored in the database.
  • Sales curve modeller application
  • Result Reports, which consisted of individual campaign results and fiscal year multi-campaign results rollup
  • Query Tool that allows the user to slice and rollup sales results and planning data dynamically

The Results

The multi-channel planning process is now a cornerstone of the direct marketing planning function and fully supported by the application, saving the client significant time:

  • Collating weekly sales results decreased from 6-8 hours before the solution to less than 10 minutes.
  • Creating a new campaign plan now takes about one minute compared to 16 hours before.
  • Manual errors have been virtually eliminated by locking down the most sensitive areas of the application and fully automating data feeds from the source systems.