The challenge

Within the B2B segment, our telecom client has challenges in implementing its product and distribution strategy as it lacks insights on product revenue and product performance. Due to a heterogenous IT landscape, products are not uniformly identified across the different internal systems. The legacy product taxonomy was outdated, leading to a low level of confidence in the data, resulting in people using their own (local) reports and business logic, further adding to the complexity and heterogeneity.

There was a lack of governance around product information management. Some products were not identifiable within the source systems mostly due to business process workarounds. Moreover, a lack of insights on the level of product revenue impeded commercial steering as the distribution strategy required steering mechanisms that facilitate differentiation between products.

Our client required a solution that ensures one truth for product performance reporting, regardless of system or organization.

The solution

Our solutions focused on 2 streams:

1. We created a roadmap to enable product identification within the various source applications, requiring us to also co-ordinate a business process redesign.
2. We designed and implemented an agnostic product reference manager that creates a single source of truth for products and maps these to product codes within the multiple sources:

• • • cataloguing product source codes through uniform product labels.
    • containing a commercial product taxonomy (product roll up) capable of including multiple taxonomies for different purposes (e.g. marketing taxonomy vs. product taxonomy).
    • integration with the data-warehouse to guarantee the lead as single source for reporting on product performance.
    • strict governance is arranged in order to ensure high data quality and data trust throughout the entire organization.

The result

Our solution contributes to a better implementation of the distribution strategy. The solution also formed the basis to construct a product P&L and enables linkage of sales to revenue on product level, contributing to transparency within the value chain that is needed to detect revenue leakage.