Business Intelligence Success Story

Bayer CropScience

Bayer CropScience (BCS) is a leader in crop production for the agricultural industry. As a leading manufacturer of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, seed treatments and canola seed, BCS supplies seed and crop protection to more than 60,000 Canadians.

Challenge

The challenge for BCS was that data collection, processing and rebate fulfillments were handled by an outsourced Point of Sale (POS) group. This third-party POS service took the information from retailers using different systems; fed the information into the POS and created a rebate cheque for each farmer. Some of the challenges BCS faced from this process included:

  • Slow and inaccurate processing of data submitted
  • Onerous data submission processes for independent retailers
  • Lack of visibility into market intelligence data
  • Delayed turnaround of annual rebate fulfillment setup

Solution

The Ideaca team created a data management solution for Bayer CropScience to facilitate the payment of rebates back to farmers buying BCS products.

The solution is a combination of a Master Data Management (MDM), Custom Application and Reporting solution to support their rebate application process. The BCS rebate application process (Custom Application) allows individual and groups of farmers to sign up for and receive their respective rebates. BCS supports a variety of rebate programs; each of which has a unique set of rebate calculations that change every year. The rebate calculation can be quite complex and must consider purchase combinations from a variety of products, minimum purchases requirements, conversion and rebate rates and manual adjustments. Therefore, a dynamically configurable rebate calculation process was developed to support the current year’s programs and allow for ad hoc program analysis without having to redevelop their programs each year.

Benefits

Ideaca’s solution enabled BCS to manage POS data as well as calculate and distribute rebate program entitlements in-house. BCS now has direct visibility and control over data quality and was also able to fund the cost of the project with the savings realized from the significant reduction of third party services. Some additional benefits include:

  • Reduced future development effort
  • More accurate rebate calculations
  • Increased planning and analysis capability
  • Timely and integrated data