Beverage Suppliers Need Their Depletion Data

As an importer or supplier, you need to know how your product is selling at the Retail Account Level (RAD). However, since in most cases, your customer is the distributor in their network, how can you tell who is buying your product? The sales through the distributors are usually called depletions and without the ability to gather and analyze this information, you have very little insight to a major part of your business.

Most Distributors produce depletion data from their ERP systems or a separate Vendor Depletion Reporting System. They will usually include sales by product line, item, size. Some will also provide inventory levels of your products and SKU’s.

Different Distributors, Different Formats

The good news is the information is available, but how will you collect and make sense out of it? The reports will come in from each distributor in their format with the own unique coding for item numbers, descriptions, pack sizes, etc. Some will be in bottles and some will be in cases. Putting this information into a meaningful format and scrubbing the data is a time consuming job. To add to the work, you may get this data in spreadsheets or PDF reports.

Ignoring the need to understand this part of your business is not an option. Making it a job for the internal staff is one way to go. You can have your sales team trying to get this information and cut and paste it into spreadsheets or you can have them out driving your sales and building your brand. The solution depends on your desire to work on your core business or do part time data processing.

Finally, a Solution to Your Depletion Problems (Beverage Industry)

Our Depletion Management services will take this entire job off your hands and give you the data and reporting to understand your business. Because this is one of our core business functions, you will get your information very quickly since we have a team of people processing the data as soon as it is available.

This will give you not only the data but the information you need. How are you doing compared to last month, last year? Are you getting the on premise sales you want? How many new Accounts were opened with your products? Are your promotions giving you the results you need?

Beverage Data Solutions – Processing of BDN Files

Our Beverage Data Solutions provide several levels of service depending on the business model you prefer. Below are the services available.

• Collect the data on your behalf for processing
• Process the data – in all forms including excel, text files, pdf files to the designed output format.
• Process the data to a standard output so you can easily perform analysis across your business even when the data received is in various formats
• Convert the data to standard formats like cases or case equivalent based on your instructions
• Balance the data to ensure accuracy and format requirements
• Transmit the data to whomever you designate (i.e. BDN)
• Provide status information to you

BDN File Processing

If you are using Beverage Data Network (BDN) for your data collection, the data format requirements can be difficult to accomplish without technical resources. If you are not meeting these requirements it will cause delays processing your information, may reduce the data available to you and potentially increase your cost. We have partnered with BDN to process the data to their precise standards. Our standard level of service is to have the data transmitted to BDN within 48 hours of receiving the data file. In most cases, we will have the data processed in the first week after the close of the month. This will give you a much faster turnaround of the BDN data for your analysis. All this can be accomplished at a much lower cost than manually collecting the information and trying to format the data.

How We Help in the Beverage Data Network Data Process

We know the Beverage Data Network collection and submission process can be not only time consuming, but difficult to accomplish without the proper technical resources. This is where Beverage Data Solutions will step in to alleviate some of the workload. Below is a flow chart which describes how our services can assist your company in the data retrieval and submission process.

Need Help Getting Your Beverage Data Network (BDN) Data?

Many distributors within the beverage industry cannot support the format in which BDN requires the data to be in. In situations like this, you will be left unable to view your depletions and unable to get your RAD data. This may leave your company to run at much less than optimum capacity and possibly slow down business processes.

Beverage Data Solutions Will Collect Your Data for Beverage Data Network

The first step in the data retrieval process to be submitted to BDN is simply collecting the data from various distributors. This process can be done by Beverage Data Solutions for your company. We will collect the Beverage Data Network data from your distributors for you.

Processing Your Distributor Data for You

Sometimes, distributors will give their data in various formats including .XLS, .DOCX, or .PDF, making the process a bit more confusing. Once we collect your distributor data, we will the process it into a standardized format for you. We will also calculate cases to bottles to make sure that your reports remain consistent. This guarantees that you do not miss any information and allows you to remain informed of exactly what is going on with the sales of your products.

Beverage Data Network (BDN) Data Format

Beverage Data Solutions will convert your distributor data into the BDN format for you. This allows your information to be processed by BDN quickly and efficiently without any delays in the process.

Balance and Control

On top of all of the above services that Beverage Data Solutions offers, we will make sure to do it without any errors and we will confirm that it is in Beverage Data Network possession to be processed.

Optimize Your Business With Better Information

If you are in the wine and spirits or beverage industry, now is the time to truly optimize your company’s performance. With better, more accurate and consistent data, your company will be able to have the information you need at your finger tips and run your company more efficiently.

Whether you are a beverage distributor or supplier, a business intelligence software can help you in more ways than one. If you are looking for a resource that can take your data, analyze it, then give you an in depth look on what is really going on with your company, then you are in the right place. Our BI software, Answergen offers a wide array of tools that lets you break down your company in multiple different ways so that you can track sales, depletion reports, distributors, and other options. Many companies use Nielsen Beverage Data Network (BDN) to submit and process their data which require specific requirements. We can help you collect the data to be submitted directly to BDN, format it for you, then analyze that data for your specific use.