Making the Most of Your Performance Data: Q&A with Bedrock Analytics

by Hugh Williams on 19th Jun 2018 in News

Understanding your product and category performance data has been crucial to FMCG brands since the dawn of e-commerce. Here, Will Salcido (pictured below), CEO, Bedrock Analytics, which has recently secured a USD$7.2m (£5.4m) round of funding, tells RetailTechNews their vision for the space, and why gaining insights from their performance data has been tough for FMCGs.

RetailTechNews: Can you briefly explain how Bedrock’s technology works?

Will Salcido: Bedrock takes in all of the complex data that a CPG manufacturer gets from retailers, syndicated data firms, and other sources, and distills it down to its essence, enabling the company to quickly and easily identify important insights regarding a product’s sales trends, market opportunities, competitive threats, pricing strategies, and more. Our platform then helps produce convincing sales presentations in a matter of seconds by exporting data visualisations directly into the manufacturer’s template, saving hours of time and giving new capabilities to the sales team.

How does using Bedrock differ from CPG brands attempting to analyse the data they collect from retailer partners, or firms such as Nielsen?

The first thing that a CPG brand has to do when it gets data from retail partners, or measurement firms such as Neilsen, is reconcile the two datasets with one another. This can be a difficult task because the systems are usually structured differently. Bedrock harmonises these disparate data sets, so right off the bat we save the brand a lot of time and trouble. We also give them the tools to dig into the data quicker than they ever could on their own, and get a deeper level of insight, so that they can fully understand the challenges and opportunities their products face. And, lastly, Bedrock isn’t just an analytics tool, but also a presentation tool. We help our users to convert insights into a convincing sales deck in a matter of seconds.

Will Salcido, CEO, Bedrock Analytics

What are the benefits to your customers of using Bedrock’s technology?

The primary benefit to CPG manufacturers is that we help them close more deals to fuel their revenue and growth. By extracting better insights and building killer sales presentations, CPG makers are able to convince retailers to give them all-important shelf space. We also help the CPG manufacturers keep a pulse on the health of their businesses. A library of highly customisable reports allows executives to discover powerful insights and monitor the business from many angles. With a simple and elegant interface and user-centric design, we save our customers a lot of time and resources for category management and sales activities.

Why has the CPG industry been slower to adopt machine learning and augmented analytics than other industries?

The main reason CPG manufacturers haven’t adopted advances in data and analytics like other industries is that the right tools simply haven’t been available to them. The CPG industry has very specific needs, because of the kind of data that comes in and the way it gets structured. One of the big innovations that Bedrock delivers is the ability to aggregate and harmonise all the data into one very powerful yet very simple interface, so that CPG manufacturers finally have access to all their data, all in one place, along with the insight automation tools to help distill it to what matters. Based on the reception we have gotten from the industry, CPG manufacturers are eager to embrace advanced analytics to help take their growth to the next level.

With Bedrock’s new funding, what is next for the business? How will the funding help develop the technology?

We plan to hire aggressively to fill positions in sales, engineering, customer success, analytics and other functions as our company grows quickly. Of course, we will also pour many of the funds into product development so that we can bring even more analytic-based innovations to the industry as quickly as possible. Our mission is to enable CPG manufacturers to make the most of their retail sales data, so we will continue to seek ways to use machine learning and advanced analytics to extract meaningful insights from complex datasets.