A PUBLICATION OF RELATIONAL SOLUTIONS

IMPLEMENTING & MANAGING THE

DEMAND SIGNAL MANAGEMENT PROCESSTHE STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE ON HOW TO IMPLEMENT AND MANAGE THE DSM PROCESS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3A Misconception

6Building Blocks

8All You Need Is- Time

10A Single Source of Truth

12What Else?

14Choosing Independence

CHAPTER ONE

A MISCONCEPTION

A MisconceptionAll Data Isn’t Clean Data

One misconception is that retailers send clean data. This simply is not the

case. The cleansing and validation of the data is critical. Invalid data will give you

invalid results. Retailers often send incomplete data. They also send duplicate

data. In addition, they tend to “recast” previously sent data. Thus, how does one

distinguish between duplicate and recast data? How do you identify missing

fields? How is it rectified and re-loaded? What are the business rules? How is it

modeled for reporting that is specific to Point-of-Sale data? Can it be integrated

with internal data such as shipments, forecasts, budgets, etc.? How do you

identify and analyze promotions? How can you predict problems before they

impact your bottom line? Do you have the time and knowledge to shift through all

this data to find only the nuggets that contain actionable information?

Because of the complexity, most CPG manufacturers simply buy

summarized data from third party data providers. But by having an enterprise

demand signal management solution in house or in a hosted environment,

manufacturers can get more timely information and often save money by

purchasing only the data they aren’t already getting from the retailers.

Not all retailers send clean data: Cleansing and validation is critical.

A true demand signal management solution has pre-defined processes set up to automate the extraction, transformation, cleansing, synchronization, and management processes.

- Janet Dorenkott, Co-Founder, Relational Solutions

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CHAPTER TWO

BUILDING BLOCKS

Building BlocksStarting With IT

Building a demand signal management solution is not an easy task. Most IT

departments of large companies are accustomed to building a data warehouse

from internal data such as orders, shipments and finance. But building a demand

signal management solution for POS data is completely different, although the

fundamental methodologies should be the same.

With POS, you are dealing with 3rd party data that you have little to no

control over. It comes in by the bucket full. Some of its daily, some weekly and

some monthly yielding various levels of granularity. A lot of data from many

retailers and other data sources, in varying formats supporting multiple feature

sets. How do you consolidate it all, automate the process and build it so that it is

both scalable and flexible and in a way that you won’t outgrow it? How do you

align granularity levels and account for unlike calendars?

CHAPTER THREE

ALL YOU NEED IS- TIME

All You Need Is- Time But At What Cost?

The Data integration process of transferring data from source to target can

be painfully time consuming, tedious, and expensive. Many developers want to

hand-code much of this work through the use of SQL scripts and stored

procedures. This process is time consuming, difficult to maintain and support,

impossible to manage, error prone, and not optimized for performance. What if

something needs to be changed? Is any of it documented?

CHAPTER FOUR

SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH

A Single Source of TruthWhat Your Solution Should Offer

A true Enterprise demand signal management solution handles the data

integration, cleansing and management processes. A good demand signal

management process flow should be easy to use, have database specific API tie-

ins, make simple tasks easy and complex tasks possible, require little to no coding,

take advantage of in-memory processing for maximum performance and provide

a fast ROI for your POS project.

A true demand signal management solution has pre-defined processes set

up to automate the extraction, transformation, cleansing, synchronization and

management processes. Because every company is different, the demand signal

management solution should be open and allow for customization and

enhancements of these processes.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHAT ELSE?

What Else?A DSM Checklist

A metadata repository is an important aspect of any demand signal

management project. It contains all your source and target tables and field

definitions. It also contains any re-useable transformation logic.

The demand signal management process should be well documented and should include:

• Job graphics

• Job mappings

• Filters

• Input & output table layouts and table definitions

• SQL Statements

• Transformation & cleansing routines

• Job Parameters

• A flexible data model

• Data Enrichment components

• Business Rules

• Instructions on how to add additional retailer data

• Automated alerts & report distribution

• The ability to create ad-hoc reports

CHAPTER SIX

CHOOSING INDEPENDENCE

Choosing IndependenceSolutions That Promote Freedom

Time and time again we see vendors leave their customers completely

dependent on them. If they want to add a new retailer, they need to license a new

module. If they want to add a new data source, they have to license a new data

integration tool and contract services. Since demand signal management is a

“process” and not a “product” companies should have the option to make future

enhancements and management decisions without being forced to go back to the

vendor whenever they need changes.

You should have the control (if you choose) to run processes, stop them,

view the log files, and even monitor the job in real-time. An enterprise solution

should support many databases so as your data grows, you are not throwing away

your old solution. It should also support many business intelligence tools and offer

the option to have the solution hosted or behind your firewall.

ALTERNATIVES?When it comes to choosing the right solution for your organization, it is important to weigh the options. To make things a little easier, we’ve developed a “Demand Signal Process” checklist to help you weigh the alternatives.

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