Over the past several years I’ve worked at a mid-size company and moved from a basic analyst role to wearing several data hats. Mostly taking on data engineering and business intelligence tasks. The hot thing right now is Power BI reporting, so I build out data pipelines, create data models, and design Power BI reports. This has lead to a lot of career success at my company, but lately I’ve been more and more frustrated by the seemingly antiquated data practices in the CPG industry.
My company is a bit unique in that we are not a single retailer or manufacturer. We work with CPG brands and retailers across the entire country. This means we rely heavily on syndicated retail data from providers like Circana (merger between IRI and The NPD Group) and NielsenIQ (NIQ). They get retail scan data from almost every CPG retailer in the country. Except some retailers are exclusive to one platform, so you’ll never have a complete picture without both.
However, Circana and NIQ do not make it easy to extract what I consider medium-size data. Everything is a portal with data presented across various “dashboards” and rudimentary no-code report creator web apps. The minute you ask about an API or data transfer service they wonder why you would ever want to leave their platform. And when you do convince your company to purchase large data extract access or similar (why do we need that when we have “analysts” who can extract hundreds of small data pieces through the web portal?), you find out it’s incredibly fragile, inflexible, slow, and unreliable. The pricing for access is never transparent either.
In some cases, I can access a retailers’ data directly (for the manufacturers my company works with) though their web portal and reverse engineer an API. But that’s typically a limited data set and more supply chain focused.
Has anyone developed a successful data strategy in the CPG realm? Is there an opportunity here to solve these problems? Are these normal problems in tech/other industries?
NIQ get their data from multiple sources and also via partnerships and along with their credibility amongst executives their only moat is their data and so I can understand why they would limit access to it.
For smaller companies, using web data from omni-channel platforms is a possibility but not without challenges. Platforms have become increasingly weary and make changes every week to make the job of those extracting data more difficult.
Are these problems normal? Well, I’m happy to see your post because my job is to help companies deal with exactly such challenges which are increasingly harder to solve.
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And it’s all built on mainframes. Nielsen is a 100 year old company that was run like a monopoly until 15 years ago, now they are owned by private money, saddled with trash systems, a massive loss in market trust, and retailers have learned to sell their data directly to CPGs.
They often can’t get you what you want because their tech is from before the modern API era, and no one who is capable wants to work for them. It might have started as clever lock in, now it is just circumstance.
I recently was a co-founder of a delivery app in the CPG space, and I think this space is ripe for disruption. We were running micro-fulfillment centers and staffing delivery drivers, but I wanted to pivot into a SaaS model taking on the data-plumbing between manufacturers and retailers. It absolutely amazed me that NOBODY seemed to have even half-decent API’s.
I wish people could all just get together and decide on things like a universal barcode system. You’d think things like electronic inventory transfers would be the norm, yet we were still dealing mostly in paper receipts.
We ended up spending a couple months reverse engineering these files (they ended up looking like database page tables or something) to finally break out of that ecosystem and get the data in our own databases.
It was a lot of work but absolutely worth it in the end. I have a feeling just the ability to natively read and convert those files is worth a lot but it's also the kind of thing that seems like it might be hard to sell...
You mention retailer web portals being the only source you can get some of the data you need and that it's very manual. Historically Walmart has had the same situation with their Retail Link application that vendors can download sales data from (this has finally changed recently with the release of Walmart Luminate). No API. Just an antiquated UI that you can create scheduled reports that export excel files. To that end, for the last 20+ years there has been a vibrant industry in Northwest Arkansas (where Walmart is based) of startups creating web crawler based systems that create, schedule, and download reports from Retail Link and then ingest them into a system that is more conducive to powering the analytics demands of vendors. This niche industry of web crawler based data and analytics companies has created a market (just taking some broad but somewhat confident guesses here) of dozens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of capital over the last 20 years. You asked if there's "an opportunity here to solve these problems", there certainly is and has been for a while, but unfortunately it's a painful path.
I feel pretty confident in stating that the "data strategy" in the CPG realm has been, is currently, and for the foreseeable future will be: persistence, resilience, and creativity. Keep trying to build something better despite the constraints, don't give up when it feels like an uphill battle, and never accept the apparent constraints of the technical environment. I've reverse engineered so many things that we would eventually turn into a product to provide value to our customers. Nothing feels better than telling someone you figured out a way around something that they were told was not possible.
Be creative. Be persistent. If I'm being completely honest, get weird. The solutions you'll need will likely not fit perfectly into best practices. You'll definitely help the company you work for today, but you'll also likely help your own career in the long run (if you choose to stay in the retail industry). It may feel like a pain in the ass today, but if you apply your persistence and knowledge to it, these challenges will be the thing that make you super valuable and versatile engineer that people want to hire in the future.
Off that’s the case you’ll find it very difficult to change.
I’ve found in other business domains, often things that make no sense and have a fairly easy solution are that way because of lock in strategies.