Mayborn Group Accelerates Customer Insights with Alteryx

Ever since the idea for Tommee Tippee, a weighted baby cup that doesn’t tip over, Mayborn Group has been known for innovative products that make life easier for babies and parents. The award-winning brand launched in the UK over 50 years ago and now has a broad range of baby products available in 60 countries worldwide.

Product innovation is one reason for the popularity of Mayborn’s baby brands in stores and online. But innovation behind the scenes is another powerful force driving business performance.

The data team at Mayborn has transformed how it processes and analyzes data using Alteryx as the foundation of its analytics strategy. The platform enables the company to reduce manual processes, improve customer insights, and boost sales.

Gaining a Global View of Data

As a global brand with hundreds of products and retailers, Mayborn had data coming from more than 100 internal and external sources. Consolidating the data for a holistic view to understand market and customer behavior at a regional and retailer level was a significant challenge. The data was manually merged and processed by individual retailers, region by region, with very specific views in isolation of one another.

“Prior to using Alteryx, we had a huge challenge bringing data together and it was impossible to do this with the technology we had at the time,” says David Elliott, Analytics Manager at Mayborn Group. “We couldn’t present the business with a global view of data.”

The team now uses Alteryx to consolidate disparate data sets and automate the process of analyzing electronic point of sale data (EPOS). “Alteryx is at the core of our analytics. Bringing the data into one picture to understand how the market is moving allows us to focus on critical areas such as product quality and competitors to be more agile in the marketplace,” explains Elliott.

“We’ve replaced the manual processes the team used to do on a weekly basis with an Alteryx workflow — reducing manual efforts by 80 to 90%,” Elliott says.

Optimizing Sales Promotion ROI

Using Alteryx to replace time-consuming data tasks, the analytics team focused on value-added initiatives like evaluating and optimizing product promotions.

Like all brands, Mayborn and its retailers use product promotions at times, for example, “3 for the price of 2” or “20% off” to encourage buyers to fill their virtual or store shopping cart.

“The commercial team wanted to know the ROI for money spent on promotions,” says Mark Little, Business Intelligence Specialist, Mayborn Group. “That question could not have been answered in the past.”

The starting point was pulling promotions data from Excel into an Alteryx workflow to analyze the impact of promotions on specific products, what the uplift in stock would look like, and combining it with internal data to help determine promotional pricing strategy.

Using Alteryx, the team established average day-to-day sales activities for each retailer so they could compare and report on the effectiveness of product promotions. “It gave us figures to show what promotions are working with what types of retailers,” says Little. “We can then use informed decisions to keep improving or deciding to bring in different promotions.”

The data insights gathered from the analytics team is passed to Mayborn Account Managers who use the data to assess promotions with retailers.  “They use the data to optimize promotional programmes and make recommendations to retail partners,” explains Elliott. “So it becomes a collaborative process that’s mutually beneficial.”

Using data-driven decision-making for product promotions in the year ahead, the team estimates a significant increase in ROI.

The analytics team also uses Alteryx to forecast demand for products that are part of promotional campaigns. “With the click of a button, demand planners can use similar data sets to develop forecasts for each retailer,” explains Little.

Building Excitement and Looking Ahead

The promotion evaluation project represents the benefit of collaborating across the business to transform outcomes and build enthusiasm around the power of analytics. In this case, a partnership between the commercial finance, category management and data teams.

“We focus on high value projects and that drives buzz within the business,” says Elliott. “People get excited about things and want to get more involved.”

Elliott and Little have plenty of ideas when it comes to how they will use Alteryx in the future, everything from machine learning to geospatial and predictive analytics.

Technology solutions like Alteryx are not something parents think about when buying baby products, but accelerating data insights plays a vital role in helping to achieve the Tommee Tippee brand vision to become the world’s number one parent-care company.