Smucker’s Wins Blacksmith Applications Award for Insight Generation
The J.M. Smucker Company is a household name. You know its high-quality brands like Folgers, JIF, Sugar in the Raw, and Sweet ‘N Low.
In 2014, Smucker’s implemented Blacksmith Applications trade promotion management (TPM) solution, and more recently became the first customer to use our analytics platform.
At Smoke Jumpers XV, we presented Smucker’s with the customer award for adoption of trade promotion analytics. Specifically, we recognize Smucker’s for its focus on generating and leveraging trade management insights.
Prior to implementing Blacksmith TPM, Smucker’s found that their accrual process was inaccurate quarter after quarter thanks to poor claims processing and limited reporting capabilities of their legacy solution.
Now, their analytics capabilities allow for detailed, timely reporting.
Even with powerful analytics on their side, the Smucker team still had a pain point: a limited set of users spent a lot of time pulling data to support the rest of the organization. Through our collaboration, several dashboards have been developed so now a larger set of users can easily access complex trade spend information.
Tom Theis, Senior Manager of Sales Productivity at Smucker’s, talks about Blacksmith’s system functionality that provides user-friendly, visual reporting and analytics dashboards. Theis says that Blacksmith’s analytics view “provides an efficient and reliable reporting tool to enable all levels of our organization to run ad-hoc analysis on our business.”
Chris Simmons, of Blacksmith Applications, remarks, “The trade team at Smucker’s understands that leveraging trade data is critical to improving the business. Their desire to simplify the production and access of trade analysis made them a great partner.”
The Results:
Smucker’s has seen faster response times and has eliminated data accuracy issues. “The improved reporting available for trade claims has helped our team reduce our open deduction balance to an all-time low,” notes Theis.
