Monday, February 15, 2016

Dimensional Modelling helps NBTY with Performance Analysis

NBTY can trace its long history as far back as 1870 with the founding of our Holland & Barrett stores in England. Over 145 years later, the company continues to enrich the lives of consumers around the world and proudly stands as the leader in health and wellness by introducing innovative products and solutions to the marketplace. A global company committed to consistently producing the highest-quality products, we offer a wide range of brands that people love and trust across the entire value spectrum. We have a significant presence in virtually every major vitamin, mineral, herb, sports, active nutrition and supplement product category and in multiple key distribution channels. Our brands include Holland & Barrett®, Nature’s Bounty®, Sundown Naturals®, Osteo Bi-Flex®, Solgar®, MET-Rx®, Pure Protein®, Body Fortress®, Balance Bar®, Puritan’s Pride® and many others.

Today NBTY employs over 13,000 associates worldwide. In addition to our Long Island corporate headquarters, NBTY has manufacturing, packaging, warehouse, distribution and administration facilities throughout the United States and Canada. The company also maintains overseas offices in the United Kingdom, China, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and New Zealand. In 2010, The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s leading private investment firms, acquired the company. In September 2014, Steve Cahillane was named President and CEO. Under his leadership, the company continues to fulfill its commitment to supporting wellness by creating products that consumers want and making them easily available anywhere they shop.

Steve Cahillane, CEO of NBTY would like to measure and analyze the performance of NBTY so that improvements and enhancements could be made. But performance measurement for a company like NBTY could be in any of the following domains:

  • Quality of care
  • Utilization/Cost/Efficiency
  • Satisfaction
  • Financial performance
  • Inventory
  • Retail sales

For the purpose of this blog, we will consider the Retail Sales process of the NBTY as that is a major dimension for their business. Some of the facts that the CEO would be interested in looking at would be: Sales Quantity, Total sales dollar amount, Total discount dollar amount, and Total Cost dollar amount. He might be interested in these metrics across stores and products. It is certain that their profitability depends on the quantity they sell. Higher the quantity sold, higher is the profit. The CEO might be interested in the discount given to the customers, to see if the sales increase during that period. Again, to answer so as to how the business is performing, one needs to analyze the total cost and sales dollar amounts. These two metrics determine the profitability to the company. Thus I feel these metrics would be really important for measuring the performance.

To keep track of all the metric mentioned above a dimensional model can come in handy. Through a well-defined grain at the atomic level these metrics can be captured accurately and then a roll up can be performed to aggregate the data to obtain the metric for a weekly, monthly or yearly period.

The type of dimension model for NBTY should be periodic. The reason is that it summarizes the metrics/measurements over a standard period like a day, week, month etc. I feel a periodic dimensional model that captures information per week is the best option as it would give the weekly quantity sold, discounted dollar amount, total cost and sales amount.

For NBTY, we can use this dimensional model to represent the Retail sales:


References:

No comments:

Post a Comment