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May 10th, 2021 (Updated 12/03/2021) | 5 min. read

Danone Brazil is part of Danone S.A. (also known as Dannon), a leading multi-local food and beverage company building on health-focused and fast-growing categories.

With more than 100,000 employees, and products sold in over 120 markets, Danone generated €23.6 billion in sales in 2020. Danone’s portfolio includes leading international brands (Actimel, Activia, Alpro, Aptamil, Danette, Danio, Danonino, evian, Nutricia, Nutrilon, Volvic, among others) as well as strong local and regional brands (including AQUA, Blédina, Bonafont, Cow & Gate, Horizon Organic, Mizone, Oikos, Prostokvashino, Silk, Vega).

Danone Brazil opened in 1970, and today has four factories, 4,500 employees and is divided into three business units: Essential Dairy & Plant-Based Products, Specialized Nutrition, and Waters.

The pricing team was small, which placed a limitation on their possibility to have necessary processes or workflows. They were using Excel, which is a generic and limited tool, which they found required time-consuming manual updating from multiple sources, which they felt was prone to error, meaning the team had very little time to work on anything else. Besides which, as the system had maxed out at its one-million-line limit, the team was forced to delete historical data in order to continue working in it. With data being in silos, simply collating it for actionable use took up to two days, and it took up to three days for new price lists to appear.

Much of the internal pricing expertise belonged to the key pricing specialist, who, due to the manual nature of the previous process, had no time for the deep analysis or chart creation he wanted to perform. This lack of time meant there was not enough capacity for exploration, discussion, strategizing or testing. Their desire to create pricing simulations was not possible as the situation meant pricing was reactive, which impacted on leveraging all pricing opportunities they wanted to.

The Need For Pricing Transformation Was Clear:

  • To convert the expertise of their key pricing specialist into processes the entire team could leverage
  • For all data (including unlimited historical data) to reside in one place to enable easy and fast price list creation, management and analysis
  • An automated process that would free up time for the team to spend on strategy and developing charts for analysis
  • An approval workflow that supported highly efficient processes
  • A simulations dashboard to help predict and visualize the impact of new price lists

With these goals in mind, Pricefx implemented an inbound solution.

Using PlatformManager: As Danone Brazil receives automated files from SAP in CSV format and these files are then sent to their SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), Pricefx automatically copies all this product, customer and sales data from the SFTP and uploads it into the system, as well as using alerts to make the monitoring of logs easier.

They used PriceAnalyzer to create dashboards (Waterfall, Simulation, Price Archives and Variance) and datamarts to provide data for the creation of charts. The Variance Dashboard: This overcomes the problem of comparing one price with another, and helps them see things such as what the variance from one period to another period was. The Simulation Dashboard lets Danone Brazil simulate and test the prices they would like to implement by allowing them to create a new price list, and before it’s approved or confirmed, use this dashboard to see what the impact with the current pricelist and this hypothetical pricelist will be. It was a real game-changer for them because now it’s super fast. Just create, click and watch what happens.

PriceBuilder enabled them to create multiple price lists, including a master price list, a price to customer list, pocket price (CO), and an SAP list, which also helped to clean their data. They also built thirty price parameters tables to set up prices and taxes and a smart workflow approval process with three levels.

The whole transformation took just six months and was handled entirely remotely!

The new system provides great value to the team. Not only have they easier access to better data, are they empowered to take tasks off the key pricing specialist, and are they supported by a clear workflow, but they can now focus their time and skills on profit-driving analytics, leaving their previous time-consuming manual tasks for the system to manage automatically.

This means the key pricing specialist is free to dive deeper into the analytics, to experiment, test, create simulations and deliver outstanding pricing outcomes.

In fact, there has been a substantial increase in team productivity and efficiency driven by process automation, data collation and fully integrated specialist pricing tools.

Danone Brazil was impressed with the speed of the transformation. They had expected it to take up to a year! In fact, speed has been the name of the game, with all processes and workflows much faster than they were before.

The project has been a success. Danone Brazil is already looking at rolling it out to sales and other departments, and will be presenting the solution to Danone Europe in the near future.

Pricefx as a pricing software is something pioneering within Danone, and I am proud to be part of this.

Andre Almeida

Senior Pricing Analyst – PRGM, Danone Nutricia Brazil

 

On behalf of the Danone team, I would like to recognize the whole Pricefx team for the partnership, excellent team spirit and engagement with the success of our implementation!

Bruno Neri

Business Solution Manager, DAN’IS Sales&TopLine, LATAM/BRAZIL