Pi Solutions, Inc

Stop missing costs and revenue elements

Current Profit Systems

Companies typically built Profit Systems to bring in the missing cost and revenue elements. Profit systems required businesses to provide a profit model and also the business rules that are used to bring the profit numbers down to transaction level. Up to now, the tools used to build profit systems were IT based tools. This usually meant that companies had to adopt a multi step process where the IT department built profit model designs based upon business inputs and used a multi step process to convert these business rules into a technical design. The challenges with this approach were:

• Profit models built in traditional way often had some lost in translation errors that often necessitated rework and in a number of cases a rebuild of the new profit system.
• The process was very resource intensive and the technology that was used to support profit datamart build was relatively slow. The initial build of Profit System applications took 12 to 18 months to complete.

Despite all the investments in technology, getting to true profitability is not easy. Just one of the hurdles is the ability to access all of the significant revenue and cost elements. A few examples of elements that typically are not available and tagged at the right levels in your Business Intelligence applications include co-op and advertisement allowances, volume rebates, warehouse expenses, freight and delivery expenses, customer services expenses, manufacturer allowances and discounts etc.

A shorter road to true profitability

Example

Marketing Managers for a CPG distributor would like to know if the promotion dollars that are allocated to retailers lead to a lift in the sales and a net increase to the bottom line. Furthermore they would like to know which specific products and programs are contributing to this increase and which ones are not. With this information, Marketing Managers can now optimize promotional dollar spend across SKUs and Customers. Additionally, Marketing Managers can create better programs and promotions.

Pi Profit Analytics

Through the innovative use of technology and design, Pi Solutions has succeeded in removing these challenges to true profitability with Pi Profit Analytics.

With Business Defined Profit Models™ (BDPM), Pi Profit Analytics provides an intuitive user interface that non-technical business users can take advantage of to build their profit models. Profit Analytics uses Business Driven Transformations™ (BDT) engine to convert the user created profit model into Netezza OnStream analytics code leveraging the power and the speed of Netezza OnStream analytics to build profit system in hours rather than weeks.

With Profit Analytics businesses can now build their profit system in 3 rather than 12 - 18 months. Businesses can build and refine their profit system in multiple iterations and this allows businesses to realize immediate benefits while building a comprehensive profit system in the long run. Rapid prototyping and modeling allows users to refine rules within and across implementation iterations.

Profit Analytics leverages Netezza’s performance in multi Terabyte databases to offer an out of the box - "what-if" analysis capability. It also uses Profit Views™ to support side-by-side analysis of multiple "what ifs" by business analysts and power users.

With very reasonable investment, Retail & CPG companies can maximize their profitability with Pi Profit Analytics; giving them a distinct edge over their competitors.