Result: a 90% market share in a massive new channel lead to total increased volumes of 500% at an FMCG manufacturer. However, this was an unexpected side effect of an effort to transform the speed of decision making for winning tenders and contracts.

The situation. Tim Richardson, now director and fonder of GrowthPath, served in Europe as Financial Controller for the Consumer channel of Philips Lighting. In this role, he lead the profitabilty anaysis of tenders with Europe-wide tenders to supply branded and private label products to retailers such as Tesco, Carrefour, Auchan, Rewe, B&Q etc. This was frustrating. Volumes of these tenders were large enough to have a significant impact on factory load, so insight into fixed and variable costing was important. As well, packinage requirements were important and highly variable. On top of that, each retailer had different logistics models.