How Pharmavite Enhanced Its Sales and Marketing Strategies With a Modern Data Hub & Advanced Analytics
Since its founding in 1971, Pharmavite LLC. has emerged as a frontrunner in the health and wellness industry, notably with Nature Made® – the #1 pharmacist-recommended vitamin and supplement brand across eight product categories. A subsidiary of Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Pharmavite operates manufacturing and distribution sites across the U.S., with over 1,700 employees, and an expansive product distribution network across major retail outlets. In addition to Nature Made, Pharmavite offers leading products through its MegaFood®, Equelle®, Uqora® and Bonafide® Health brands.
Overcoming Analytical Challenges for Growth
Like many established companies, Pharmavite’s journey of continuous expansion was hindered by a legacy reporting system that required manual intervention by the company’s IT staff, coupled with siloed, decentralized analytics and reporting. This challenge in handling data and generating insights necessitated a significant change to keep pace with the company’s growth and innovation.
“When it was all said and done, we had limited fingertip reporting on our customer and product sales and deductions. We lacked the required analytical insight for robust decision making and had a blind spot in cross-enterprise visibility to our daily sales reporting. That necessitated the move to partner with Silvon and deploy their Stratum solution for sales and operations performance analysis,” said Steve Poswillo, Director of Sales Operations at Pharmavite.
Transforming Data Analytics with Stratum
The collaboration with Silvon to implement the Stratum solution was an important part of Pharmavite’s data and analytics journey. The core component of Stratum is a sophisticated data hub that simplifies the integration and availability of critical sales and operational data for analysis.
For Pharmavite, this includes a vast array of information from multiple systems that is harmonized together by Stratum to provide visibility across the organization. The company’s reporting data hub includes sales history and trade deductions captured by its ERP system, point-of-sale data from its retailers, customer forecasts that reside in the company’s demand planning application, along with various uploads of plans, forecasts and other data by Pharmavite analysts and others.
Empowering Employees with Real-Time Insights and Collaboration
Stratum's implementation facilitated a shift towards dynamic, user-driven reporting, empowering Pharmavite employees with real-time data analysis capabilities. This shift has not only streamlined internal processes but also enhanced collaboration across departments and with partner companies, improving forecast accuracy, trade spend management, and the overall balance between supply and demand.
Easily customizable, pre-built views and reports from Stratum’s Sales and Marketing performance analysis modules provide for real-time analysis of data stored in the data hub.
Stratum’s packaged analytics yield insights about when, how often and which products Pharmavite’s customers are purchasing. They provide real-time knowledge of sales rep and channel performance. And, they offer a collaborative framework from which the company’s demand forecasts and sales plans can be easily assessed and managed.
It’s also easy for users to create additional analytical views on their own because Stratum eliminates the need for them to know how the data is stored. The data is readily accessible to them in business terms they understand.
In addition to leveraging its powerful analytical capabilities, Pharmavite’s users have the ability to send email alerts immediately to others when they find performance issues in their Stratum reports that require further attention. The alerts often include links to the supporting Stratum views. With the application’s report broadcasting function, users can easily set up and distribute reports on an automatic basis to others, too, without requiring any effort at all from their IT staff.
Stratum also integrates with Power BI and is being leveraged by Pharmavite for enriched graphical reporting with drill-down links to Stratum’s real-time data. Users who have multiple years of experience with spreadsheets can also export their Stratum reports to Excel for further analysis if they desire.
Gleaning Insights with Speed
According to Poswillo, everyone can get to the numbers quickly with Stratum. Its pre-built views are very responsive (taking only a few seconds to process and display). And building ad-hoc, on-the-fly reports typically takes only a few minutes. When looking at numbers within Stratum they are the same across multiple views and reports, like Customer Sales, Product Sales, and others. This proves extremely beneficial when working cross-functionally with Pharmavite’s marketing, supply planning, customer service, demand planning, and other groups.
Achieving a Data-Driven Culture for Enhanced Decision Making
The adoption of Stratum has provided Pharmavite with swift access to analytics, uniform visibility across reports, and improved accuracy in demand forecasting.
Insights via Stratum reporting helps to provide feedback on Pharmavite’s forecast to demand planners. They can see how well they are doing against the forecast at any time to predict demand more accurately and to keep track of changes in demand over time.
Pharmavite’s ability to have the right group of cross functional users review supply and demand via Stratum also provides the opportunity to build better insights as a feedback loop into the company’s dedicated Supply and Demand Planning system.
What Does the Future Hold for Stratum at Pharmavite?
According to Stephane Drolet, Pharmavite’s Enterprise Development Manager, the company is considering moving Stratum from an on-premise server to a cloud-based instance. “This change would enable us to easily scale and accommodate our growing data needs and base of users while decreasing our IT infrastructure costs,” he adds. Drolet also expects that the move would enable Pharmavite to benefit from quick data backup and disaster recovery if needed, seamless software updates, higher levels of security, and a reduced maintenance burden on Pharmavite’s IT staff.
Drolet added: “Our ultimate goal in moving to modern technologies like these is to better serve our community of retail customers and end consumers of Pharmavite products.”
Overall, the flexibility and user-driven nature of Stratum enables secure data sharing and sophisticated report generation without burdening IT resources.