Case 3: Piloting Procter Gamble From Decision Cockpits

Piloting Procter Gamble From Decision Cockpits

• Founded by William Procter & James Gamble
• The biggest consumer goods in the world with 300 brands
• 127,000 employees across 180 countries

1) What management, organization and technology issues had to be addressed when implementing Business Sufficiency, Business sphere and Decision Cockpits?

P&G has been a success due to its robust information technology and its willingness to pursue new IT innovations to maintain a competitive advantage. It’s Global Business Service Division is building analytics such as Business sufficiency, Business sphere and Decision Cockpits.

MANAGEMENT

Information system which involves leadership, strategy and management behaviour.

• Human Resource Management (HRM)
• Employee recruitment
• Training and development
• Monitoring employee performance
• Employee compensation (eg: payroll & benefits systems)
• Manage policies and procedures

ORGANIZATION

• Organization’s hierarchy, functional specialities, business process, culture and political interest group.

TECHNOLOGY

The organization dimension of information system consists of

• Computer hardware, software, data management technology, networking, telecommunication technology.
• By implementing Business sufficiency. Business sphere and Decision cockpits. P&G change its gathers reports, interpret data and accurate data available at immediate.

2) How did decision-making business tools change the way the company ran its business? How effective are they? Why?

The decision making tools change the way P&G ran its business by:

• Eliminate time spent debating data sets, and instead use a system that allows leaders to focus on immediate business decision by using the most accurate data available.
• P&G data for decision making across the company, from executives to brand managers, to lower level employees.
• Is more instantaneous, which people huddling together in person or via video and pulling in the right expert to fix a problem the moment it arises. More real time data and analytic expertise are required.
• Business sufficiency – furnishes P&G about market share and other key performance metrics. It based on a series of analytic model showing what’s occurring in the business right now (shipments, sales, market share) why it’s happening and what actions P&G can take (eg: ways adjust pricing, advertising and product mix to respond to the prediction)
• A new bulding block is high-quality vide conferencing because people solve hard problems faster and better when they can see one another. P&G has been an avid user for several years of room-sized Cisco TelePresence systems. The video is used as part of a collaboration environment P&G calls Business Sphere, which the executive council  use the collaborate with colleagues worldwide.
• It combines video with large screens that display data visualizations on sales, market share, ad spending and the like, so everyone in the meeting is seeing the same information. In the past year, P&G added 50 smaller Business Sphere systems around the world, giving more people access to the technology.
• The GBS team is working on a video platform that broadens access even more by letting people join in regardless of the video system they are using, whether it’s Cisco TelePresence or WebEx or FaceTime. That would mean a key team member can video in from an iPad, Droid smartphone or PC. In terms of data, this strategy needs the right real-time data.

3) How are these system related to P&G’s business strategy?

• The major goals of Decision Cockpits was to eliminate time spent by P&G employees debating the validity of competing versions of data found in the e-mails, spreadsheets, letters and report by providing a one-stop source of accurate and detailed real time business data.
• P&G employees are able to focus instead on decision for improving business by devote time and energy where is most needed.
• What’s real time? The goal P&G’s working toward is that as soon as data is collected, it’s available for use. P&G isn’t after new data types; it still wants to share and analyze point-of-sale, inventory, ad spending and shipment data. What’s new is the higher frequency and speed at which P&G gets that data, and the finer granularity. P&G has about two-thirds of the real-time data it needs. P&G is loading more data every week than the week before.
• The goal is to look at the what, why and how of a problem
• “What” is the problem itself
  is the market share stable or has it shrunk two points? Crowd-sourcing the problem means empowering and giving 58k employees business intelligence “cockpits”, which are dashboard that link to common data sources so people spend little time arguing over whose data to use.
• “Why” the cause of a problem is
  was it a bad TV ad, out-of-stock shelves or a competitor’s new product or price cut that caused a problem? Right now, the P7G IT team is working on automating analysis of the why, so employees get alerts when key events like a supply chain snafu or rival product launch happen.
• If P&G can eliminate “what” discussion of some of the “why”, and decision makers can jump right to how to solve a problem.
• The final piece is bringing in that business analytic expertise. These are people “at the intersection of business and IT”. They need to be as well versed in P&G business issues as marketing pro. And they need to be skilled in finding information, building data models and creating simulations.
• Analytics experts sitting in one more meeting to make sure the “how” to solve problems gets sorted out right then and there, not postponed until everyone gets more information.
• The old model would mean “let’s get back to this in two weeks” but with the new model “You need to be able to answer that question immediately”