Challenge
The Market Insights group encountered challenges in comprehensively tracking and analyzing the evolving market landscape. The rapid proliferation of new entrants, product line extensions, and limited-time offerings within the beverage industry has created a highly fragmented and dynamic market. In a market that is largely trend based, achieving a timely and accurate understanding of emerging beverage trends was growing difficult, leading to:
Overwhelming Amount of Beverage Markets To Analyze: Comprehensive market analyses across growing monthly sample size of 20,000 to 50,000+ data points was too impractical to humanly monitor, hindering strategic decision-making for established and emerging companies alike.
Difficulty Staying Trendy: Competitors frequently introduced new flavor variations and product extensions, creating a constantly shifting landscape of consumer choice. This rapid pace of innovation made it difficult to isolate and analyze the performance of specific flavor trends, and ultimately create a competitive product while a flavor is still trending. There were also smaller competitors that remained under the radar that would have been good acquisition candidates if they were detected sooner.
Valuable Insights Slipping Through the Cracks: The capacity for analyzing global beverage company market share data, was realistically limited. The manual process only helped address ~15 business questions per monthly reporting and dashboards, given the amount of data preparation and visualizations they could achieve. This restricted analyses to the pre-determined areas of inquiry, potentially overlooking valuable insights not encompassed by the initial questions.Because manufacturing inherently exists on thin margins, every defect, instance of downtime, or piece of wasted material directly impacts the business's bottom line. At its core, Six Sigma is a data-driven methodology that focuses on lean operation: reduced costs, enhanced efficiency, improved quality, and continuous improvement. In lean practices, the “Gemba” refers to “the place where value is created,” so with the healthcare manufacturer's issues centering around the question of “where” for their inventory, integrating LLM-powered analytics with proven Six Sigma principles was an obvious move.
