Overview

Brown-Froman is an American company and one of the largest in the spirits and wine business globally. Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Brown-Forman manufactures several well-known brands throughout the world, including Jack Daniel's, Old Forester, Woodford Reserve, Diplomatico, and more. For more than 150 years, Brown‑Forman has enriched life by responsibly building fine-quality beverage alcohol brands.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Originally, we asked “Globally, how well are Brown-Forman’s products doing when compared to our competitors?” and we could not accurately answer this question with the way we were managing data. 

We lost visibility for 80% of products once they were shipped to distributors, wholesalers, and government entities. We receive data on how much our distributors ship Brown-Forman products to their customers while also purchasing data from consumer insight companies such as IRI & Nielsen for our products & our competitors. However, the product information data was never brought together and was just used to determine local, in-market product strategies.

The Solution

With the need for better insights into our products and our competitors, we knew we needed a single source of truth for all products to enable management to make more informed decisions. This is where Master Data Management (MDM) was needed to allow for all data to be mastered centrally for the entire organization. MDM is where business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency, and accountability of the enterprise's official shared master data assets.

The results

Once Master Data Management was implemented globally at Brown-Forman, we saw quick results around product data. Brown-Forman, globally, gained visibility into category performance for each of our brands at a regional and global level, insights into unexpected competitive product interactions across all geographies, the ability for global brand teams to see what’s working and what’s not to shift strategies, implemented global approach to price positioning vs our competitors and built workflows for data owners to respond to harmonization needs.

Additionally, Brown-Forman saw unexpected (but positive) results for future scalability and growth such as by enhancing our Pricing Analytics Solution to leverage harmonized data, creating the same matching product definitions used for all external product definitions, having the ability to align data from our distributors with our internal P&L, increasing the ease of communication between business units regardless of geography, and increasing the speed of projects since underlying product datasets are already harmonized.

Metrics

Before our Master Data Management project, globally we had no accurate insight into how our products were doing across markets, nor how we were doing vs our competitors. After the initial project launch, we set goals for our markets to harmonize all of the products that make up 98% of the value of their country. This effort significantly enhanced how we market, innovate, and price our products against our direct competitors. 

The Technology

We chose Semarchy xDM for its scalability, strong master data capabilities, and value-add across the enterprise. Semarchy's quick setup and transparent business rule application made data integration easy for both technical and business users. Their personalized customer support was unique and reinforced our confidence in the product. As Semarchy innovates, we are implementing their Data Intelligence tool to enhance collaboration, governance, and data quality, supporting our growth.

Disruptive Factor

The biggest challenge we faced was handling the sheer amount of data clusters we had during implementation. Semarchy highly recommended no more than a few clusters with more than 100 master records. But Brown-Forman had the Brown-Forman cluster with over 5,000 master records and 5 additional clusters with over 1,000 master records. Despite the fact this had never been done before, Semarchy’s Technical Services team was able to go outside the normal matching and merging methodology to ensure we were bringing all datasets from all data sources for a complete picture of our product master data.

Shining Moment

When Mike Homer joined Brown-Forman, he aimed to unify product data from two external sources for nationwide consumer analysis. He envisioned combining multiple data sources by harmonizing them to a central product definition. Initially, the idea lacked support, but demonstrating the value of harmonized data changed that. Now, data harmonization is prioritized for new data sets, enabling integration within days. This has facilitated extensive analytics at both the corporate & brand levels.