Digital Operations
Product portfolio management with product mining
Examine, evaluate and optimize the product portfolio in a targeted manner with product mining
The product portfolio undoubtedly forms the core of a successful company. All processes in a company ultimately serve the purpose of selling products to customers. As crucial as product portfolio management is to a company’s success, its dependencies and structures have become increasingly complex. This means that decisions to change or adapt are very difficult, especially as different departments pursue different goals. While Sales wants a broad portfolio in order to meet all customer requirements, Warehouse Management is struggling with constantly rising storage costs and Procurement with a supply chain that is as resilient as possible. These different perspectives also make analyzing the product portfolio very complex, time-consuming and often incomplete. However, comprehensive transparency about every product in the portfolio is essential to ensure the long-term success of the company.
Product Mining creates this comprehensive transparency across all dimensions and creates a digital image of every single product in your company. This digital image, generated directly from the data in your ERP system, makes it possible to analyze your product portfolio with regard to current challenges and to prepare information for various interest groups. We rely on the solution of our software partner Soley, which is not only a pure analysis software, but also supports the quick and uncomplicated determination of decisive measures through value patterns and decision intelligence. Our many years of experience in the manufacturing sector enable us to quickly adapt the software to the various requirements and provide long-term, constructive support for decision-making processes.
Ideation and proof of concept
Benefit from competent support and guidance right from the start.
Product Mining is the emerging new mining technology that gives you unprecedented visibility into the interrelationships of your product portfolio. With this transparency, you can make informed decisions about pricing, variant management and your manufacturing strategy.
As this approach is completely new to most companies, many questions need to be clarified in advance. True to our end-to-end consulting approach, our consultants will support you right from the start. In various workshops, we focus on the most important issues, compare possible solutions and evaluate them. This gives you a clear picture of the potential of product mining and allows you to estimate your investment. At the same time, we examine whether all relevant data is available and draw up a roadmap together.
Our service packages:
- Conduct workshop to define objectives and product landscape
- Analyze system landscape and data sources
- Calculate business case
- Develop roadmap
Your benefit:
- Prioritized challenges of your product portfolio
- Evaluated possible applications of product mining technology
- Concrete implementation plan
Data Engineering
Create a customized digital twin of your product portfolio.
The dependencies within the product portfolio are enormous. Parts lists, sales documents, purchasing data and more: merging all this data requires a lot of effort and, if not implemented correctly, considerable computing power. This is why we work closely with our trusted partner Soley, a pioneer in product mining technology, on our product mining projects.
Soley technology offers a ready-made framework with an underlying graph structure, which drastically reduces the implementation effort. By cleverly transforming your data, the standard Soley data model is filled and adapted to your needs. The analyses integrated in Soley are tailored to the conditions in your company together with your product experts, enabling you to achieve initial successes and insights quickly and easily.
Our service packages:
- Connect Soley product mining technology to your source systems
- Set up data transformation pipeline
- Customize analysis models
Your benefit:
- A digital twin of your product portfolio
- Continuous data updates for timely data analysis
- Customized analysis models
Implementation support
Convert the product mining opportunities into your success in a targeted manner.
The customized analyses on the Soley platform form the basis for data-driven decisions. However, transparency is only one building block for ultimately drawing targeted and well-founded conclusions. In the area of product portfolio management, the sheer volume of products is an additional challenge, as they must theoretically be considered individually. We support you in correctly classifying the newly gained transparency and making prioritized decisions.
Soley technology helps us here: by adapting so-called value patterns to the specifics of your company, conspicuous products are automatically prioritized. With the help of decision intelligence, all process players involved can calmly evaluate the effects of possible decisions from their perspective before discussing the options for action in joint workshops. In this way, we ensure continuous use of the software and track the success of the project.
Our service packages:
- Adapt existing value patterns and develop new value patterns
- Support and monitor implementation decisions
- Train staff to use them efficiently
Your benefit:
- Prioritized recommendations for action for optimization
- Individual data visualization as a basis for decision-making
- Sustainable success with the technology
- Anchoring the added value through qualified specialists
Dr. Clemens Wolf
Manager Digital Operations
Talk to us!
Do you have questions about product mining or would you like to talk about specific use cases? Please send me a message and I will get back to you.
Sales and pricing
Increase profitability with a multidimensional shopping basket analysis.
Knowing why customers buy certain products is crucial for effective pricing and targeted sales. One-dimensional shopping basket analyses are often carried out for this purpose, which only look at products purchased together. This often overlooks a crucial dimension due to its complexity: the customer relationship. Soley’s data graph makes it possible to take this dimension into account in the shopping basket analysis and therefore offers a comprehensive analysis.
These insights allow you to directly identify and eliminate negative cross-selling performance to unlock additional sales potential. The detailed analysis of discounting not only enables you to recognize inconsistent pricing policies, but also, in combination with the product-customer relationship, to identify targeted products that are suitable for price increases and to uncover unexpected upselling opportunities.
Our service packages:
- Creating a multi-dimensional shopping basket analysis as a basis for decision-making
- Identify inconsistent discounts
- Enable targeted price point determination
Your benefit:
- Insight into all dependencies of the shopping cart
- Increase margins by eliminating inconsistent discounts and poor cross-sell performance
- Increase in sales through targeted price adjustments and development of new up-sell potentials
Variant management
Strengthen your core business and reduce your complexity costs at the same time.
New products and variants are constantly being developed to meet changing customer needs and wishes. As a result, the product portfolio of most companies is constantly growing. While the introduction of new products often takes place with great vigor and attention, the review of existing products often falls by the wayside. This increases the ballast in the product portfolio, which leads to increasing complexity, higher storage and administration costs and ultimately to a reduction in margins.
Product Mining allows you to structure your product portfolio in a targeted manner. The existing value patterns in Soley help you to distinguish core products from secondary and ballast products and enable the targeted elimination of variants and products. The complete transparency makes it possible to directly check conventional arguments – such as “We can’t discontinue this product, it is needed by main customer XY” – so that decisions can be made quickly and efficiently. You also get a clear overview of the lifecycles of your products and gain important insights for sales measures.
Our service packages:
- Use value patterns to identify the core, ancillary and ballast business
- Recognize discontinued candidates
- Prepare all relevant factors for quick decision-making
Your benefit:
- Reduction of complexity costs by reducing the portfolio ballast
- Prioritization of options for action using value patterns
- Efficient decision-making thanks to transparency and decision intelligence
Revenue-at-risk
Check supplier dependencies and secure your company’s success.
Due to the increasingly complex structures in the product portfolio, it is becoming more and more difficult to identify risky dependencies in relation to supplier relationships. The supply problems of recent years have highlighted the consequences of this lack of transparency. While the identification of components with only a few or even individual suppliers is still possible in the conventional way, the crucial information regarding the impact on the company’s own delivery performance and thus the risk is often hidden in the complexity of the nested parts lists.
Product Mining allows you to accurately assess this risk. At the touch of a button, the most critical supplier relationships are made visible with the help of value patterns. Not only the number of suppliers for a component is taken into account, but also the sales volume of all products containing this component, the share of these products in the core business and the evaluation and performance of the suppliers. This gives you complete transparency and enables you to make your supply chain more resilient and secure your supplier network.
Our service packages:
- Establish value patterns to identify risk candidates
- Derive recommendations for action in preparation for the decision-making workshop
- Checking and measuring success
Your benefit:
- Risk assessment of your supplier dependency
- Identification of critical supplier relationships
- More resilient supply chain
Production strategy
Find the ideal customer decoupling points and reduce complexity.
In addition to sales interests, it is always important to take production interests into account when optimizing the portfolio. After all, the increasing complexity of the product portfolio also poses a challenge in production. There are numerous opportunities for optimization, particularly in cooperation with sales, especially when deciding which production strategy to pursue.
The parts list structure of each product created in Product Mining enables you to take operational effects into account when selecting the production strategy and to include them in the evaluation. Not only is an optimal classification into preferred, standard and special products made, but possible customer decoupling points are also directly identified. In this way, not only can delivery times be shortened, but delivery capability can also be ensured. By specifically increasing the proportion of order-neutral pre-production, safety stocks can be reduced, as fluctuations in demand become less relevant, and unit costs can be reduced at the same time by increasing the batch size.
Our service packages:
- Analyze stockpiling strategy
- Identify priority products
- Develop material BOM graphs to analyze the manufacturing strategy
- Identify customer endpoints
Your benefit:
- Determining the ideal production strategy
- Reduction of safety stocks
- Securing the ability to deliver
- Reduction in unit costs
