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Procter & Gamble’s Data Excellence Journey

Data quality is an enormous challenge and an opportunity for businesses. At GS1, we have discussed with Laura Becker, President of Global Business Services at Procter & Gamble, about how they have embarked on a Data Excellence Journey.

Q: Why has data become so important for P&G?

Because we all live in a data-connected and data-dependent world!

The need for high-quality data is clear nowadays, in every aspect of our business. We need data to meet the demands generated by the rapid growth of e-commerce. We need to be able to respond to the growing expectations of customers, consumers and regulators for data about sustainability and ingredient transparency.

In fact, at Procter & Gamble, we see the excellence of our data as a key element of our strategy to win with customers and consumers.

Our ultimate goal is to delight consumers, whether they shop in-store or online, and to create outstanding experiences when consumers interact with our products. Data excellence is an integral part of that, an integral element of our product superiority.

Q: You’ve spoken about being on a “journey” to data excellence. How did P&G get started on that journey?

Well, we knew we first had to show senior leaders across all our brands and all our markets why data excellence mattered, and we did that. Some of the people who were initially the least engaged and most skeptical have become our biggest champions. The support and sponsorship of these senior leaders has been critical.

Beyond this senior level sponsorship, we also needed to transform the processes, the digital technologies, and the organisational structures that supported data creation.

Today, we regularly measure and report our product data quality to the senior leaders of the company.

Q: What made this transformation possible?

The key was that our business leaders saw benefits and that these benefits provided a return on our initial investments.

At Procter & Gamble, we see the excellence of our data as a key element of our strategy to win with customers and consumers.

Laura Becker
President of Global Business Services at Procter & Gamble

Q: What sorts of benefits did you see?

We saw increases in productivity and decreases in costs. We were able to eliminate many hidden costs from processes that had previously not been optimized. For example, we saw that there were often fragmented or multiple touches of the same data that added no value, or worse, even created data inaccuracies.

And we have eliminated costs due to inaccurate data. For example, this approach can avoid fines from having overweight trucks due to wrong product weights or dimensions.

We’re also now able to take our data analytics and AI to the next level because we have a solid, reliable base of product data that can be matched with external consumer data. That possibility gets our business leaders really excited!

Q: What are some specific initiatives going on in this area at P&G?

Procter & Gamble has been collaborating with the Consumer Goods Forum, with GS1 and with many other partners to support a global journey toward data quality. We’re a co-sponsor of the Consumer Goods Forum Product Data Coalition of Action and are working in partnership with GS1 in order to drive initiatives such as GTIN ubiquity, Verified by GS1 and the GS1 Global Data Model.

We are also working to make the most out of everything we have accomplished so far. For example, we ran a joint exercise with a customer where we took a large sample of our GTINs and compared them to Verified by GS1 data. The findings were extremely beneficial for both organisations because they enabled us to create sustainable process changes that will keep the data at the customer and at P&G in sync.

We’re a co-sponsor of the Consumer Goods Forum Product Data Coalition of Action and are working in partnership with GS1 in order to drive initiatives such as GTIN ubiquity, Verified by GS1 and the GS1 Global Data Model.

Laura Becker
President of Global Business Services at Procter & Gamble

Q: What’s your evaluation of emerging issues in this space?

A clear example of this is in product sustainability. The data needs here are growing by the day, covering areas such as packaging, formula, brand claims and carbon emissions, just to name a few. New product attributes are being requested, and each one needs its own data models and standards. We must be able to respond to these demands in a faster and more agile way.

Q: What’s your advice to companies undertaking their own data excellence journey?

I have three thoughts I’d suggest keeping in mind.

The first is that high-quality data is the common denominator. It’s the future currency of new initiatives, across the board. If we don’t hold ourselves accountable to creating and maintaining strict data quality standards, none of us will reach our objectives.

The second is ‘it takes two to tango’. We, as trading partners, need to hold each other accountable to drive this work forward. Brand owners need to provide high quality and consistent data, and retailers need to use it in their processes. That’s how we will create an ecosystem that leverages the output of these efforts. That’s how all parties will see a return on their investment.

And finally, I’d like people to realize that we truly are at a pivotal, defining moment, and we need to seize it. The arrival of next-generation barcodes that can hold more information than traditional barcodes, the growing demands for environmental and sustainability data: these are big changes that we can leverage to meet consumer needs in a data-centric way.