Beverage Commercial Performance MVP

Problem Commercial teams were working from inconsistent definitions and slow reporting cycles.

Focus I aligned key metrics, unified the reporting layer, and built views for pricing, promotion, and channel performance.

Outcome Teams got faster reporting, clearer definitions, and earlier signals on promotion performance.

// analyst.signals

Metric alignment Commercial reporting Promotion decision support

Overview

Commercial managers needed one source of truth for revenue movement across channels, products, and promotions.

Business Context

Commercial teams were managing pricing, distribution, and promotion performance with fragmented reporting. Sales, finance, and field teams were looking at the same activity through different definitions, which made it harder to react quickly and align on what was driving revenue movement.

Problem Statement

The business needed faster and more consistent visibility into commercial performance, especially across products, channels, and promotions, so teams could act before issues affected revenue and margin.

Analyst Objective

Create a reporting and KPI layer that standardised core commercial definitions, reduced manual reconciliation, and made promotion and channel performance easier to review during live trading periods.

Stakeholders

Commercial managers needed timely visibility into revenue, margin, and promo effectiveness.
Sales teams needed channel and account views they could use in weekly reviews.
Finance teams needed trusted gross-to-net and product hierarchy definitions.
Field teams needed simpler performance signals to guide action in market.

Key Questions

Which channels, products, or regions were driving changes in revenue and margin?
Where were promotions generating uplift, and where were they diluting value?
Which metric definitions needed to be standardised across teams?
How could reporting move from retrospective explanation to in-period decision support?

Workflow Thinking

Commercial activity flows from product and channel execution into weekly sales and margin reporting.
Promotions affect both volume and value, so they need to be reviewed against timing, geography, and product mix.
Decision-makers need one shared layer before they can compare performance across teams with confidence.

KPI Framework

Business metrics: revenue, gross margin, gross-to-net movement, promo uplift.
Operational metrics: report turnaround time, reconciliation effort, data quality checks.
Commercial review metrics: channel growth, SKU contribution, regional variance, period-over-period change.

These metrics mattered because they supported trading decisions, budget discussions, and promotion reviews from the same base.

Approach

Modeled channel and SKU dimensions with dbt and documented test coverage.
Unified volume, value, and promo tables in a single semantic layer.
Built an MVP dashboard with period-over-period change, margin bridge, and geo splits.
Added decision checklists for account managers directly in the dashboard notes.

Insights

Reporting delays were partly a data definition problem, not only a dashboard problem.
Standardising product and commercial definitions reduced review friction across sales and finance.
Earlier visibility into promo performance made it easier to intervene before campaign spend was fully absorbed.

Deliverables

Business problem framing for commercial reporting
KPI definition and metric alignment notes
Unified semantic model for revenue, margin, and promo analysis
Dashboard MVP for weekly commercial reviews
Review notes for account managers

Results

Reduced report preparation from two days to under one hour.
Established consistent gross-to-net definitions across commercial teams.
Enabled earlier promo corrections during in-flight campaign reviews.

Next Steps

Add account-level views for promotions that are underperforming.
Extend reporting to include forecast versus actual trade performance.
Capture the core metric definitions in a short shared glossary for sales and finance.

Supporting Documents

Open BRD summary Open PRD summary Open TRD summary

Appendix: Reconstructed Analyst Artifacts

These extracts are included to show the requirements thinking behind the reporting layer.

Business Requirements Summary

Business goal: give commercial teams a single reporting view for pricing, channel, and promotion performance.
Problem to solve: inconsistent definitions and manual reconciliation were slowing reviews and weakening decision quality.
In scope: metric alignment, shared hierarchies, reporting model, and dashboard views for commercial review.
Out of scope: trade execution systems, pricing approval workflows, and account planning outside the reporting layer.
Success measures: faster report preparation, consistent metric definitions, and earlier visibility into promotion performance.

Technical Requirements Summary

Unified product and channel dimensions across source datasets.
Shared semantic layer for volume, value, margin, and promotion reporting.
Data quality checks for hierarchy consistency and KPI accuracy.
Dashboard views for period change, margin movement, and regional comparison.
A reporting structure that can be maintained without repeated spreadsheet reconciliation.