Getting new products to market quickly, optimizing global supply chain efficiency, and satisfying existing customers while developing new customers and markets are “must dos” for today’s hypercompetitive consumer and industrial products companies.

Common across all these challenges are the need for real-time information from anywhere in the supply and demand chain, at any point in the product lifecycle, at any time of day 7x24x365.

Unfortunately in most products companies today, this data resides in multiple systems, in multiple formats, with multiple owners. Overcoming these silos is critical. And as a result, consumer and industrial products companies are seeking new ways to integrate their data.

Cisco Data Virtualization Solutions for Products Companies

Consumer and industrial products companies such as Crocs, Dell, HP, and Sony rely on the Cisco Data Virtualization Platform to provide the diverse customer and product information required across a range of strategic initiatives and business-critical IT projects.

Cisco data virtualization is a more agile, lower cost data integration approach that successfully addresses complex supply chain data silos and delivers significant business benefits including:

  • Increase Revenues – Accelerate new product introductions
  • Improve Productivity – Optimize supply chain decisions and merchandizing mix
  • Reduce Costs – Avoid long data integration development cycles and excess data replication
  • Decrease Risk – Improve visibility across customers and product lines
  • Ensure Compliance – Meet FTC and EU compliance data requirements faster, for less

Selected Examples

  • Customer Management – Increased revenue per customer, increased customer retention, higher customer satisfaction, lower customer acquisition costs, and lower costs of servicing customers are but a few of the benefits of an excellent customer relationship. But products companies cannot achieve this excellence without data. Customer data exists in dozens of systems. In fact, large enterprises often have multiple CRM and related systems in operation. Cisco data virtualization lets you create a virtualized single view of customer that provides real-time access to customer data across multiple underlying systems, And as your customer systems evolve, Cisco lets you adds new data sources easily and flexibly.
  • Global Supply Chain Management – Today, manufacturing and distribution is global. With your components and finished goods anywhere in the world at any given time, having clear visibility into your inventory wherever it resides can help you more efficiently manage your supply chain, saving costs and increasing revenues. Cisco data virtualization lets you to tap into your disparate ERP, warehouse and logistics management systems, and manufacturing execution systems to create a unified, real-time view of your global inventory situation.
  • Shipping & Distribution – Creating a hot new product is only half the battle for a consumer products company. Getting the items to where there is the most demand is the equally challenging. To determine the proper allocation for product distribution, companies must have a good historical data. But demand changes quickly with the capricious consumer, and companies must be able to react quickly to capture sales of a hot asset before it becomes stale. That means quick reallocation, distribution, and shipping of products. Real-time visibility into inventory, sales and distribution data can help this effort. Cisco data virtualization can give consumer products companies the proper access to its disparate data to make the right decisions.
  • Merchandising – Attracting customers and motivating them to buy is a continuously evolving process for products companies who are also retailers. Effective merchandising with the right products, the right product mix, and the right product placement could mean the difference between profit and loss. The combination of historical data warehouse information and up-to-the- minute sales information at the fingertips of a retail planner can help him make the proper merchandising decision. Cisco data virtualization lets you query your retail network at anytime to bring back all the relevant information and present it in a uniform manner to promote effective merchandising decisions.