We deliver sustainable business advantage:

Our initiatives are client and situation specific. What follow are a few examples of projects our team have delivered:

Strategic Business Plan for leading Frozen Food producer:

Recently separated from a major multi-national business, this Private Equity backed business was for the first time in full control of it’s plans and needed to set clear direction for the next 3 years.
  • Our client was in the process of building a new business culture, along with a new management team, and needed to deliver strong results to its new investors.
  • Rather than providing an outsourced strategy solution, Praeda embedded itself within the organisation to coach the existing marketing and sales teams in developing challenging strategies and development plans.
  • The resulting strategic plan has identified a number of key challenges to meet the business’ targets; however the approach has ensured both ownership of the challenges and belief that they can be delivered against.

Strategic Vendor Management for Global FMCG company:

Our client was spending significant sums every year supporting part of their global IT architecture, but lacked the hard facts about their use of support and the value it represented to have meaningful negotiations with the vendor.
  • Due to the size and complexity of their global business it was impossible for our client to understand how their demands on vendor support were evolving. At the same time they were unsure as to the value they received from the vendor, and how to renegotiate the support agreement.
  • A global interview programme was implemented, combined with an analysis of all available support usage data. This clearly demonstrated that the client’s ongoing investment in infrastructure was fundamentally reducing their demands on external vendor support. In parallel, detailed financial analysis of the vendor highlighted our client was paying higher than average fees whilst the vendor’s cost to provide support was falling.
  • Armed for the first time with hard facts to defend their position, our client was able to successfully negotiate a preferential deal on their support fees, and open previously blocked discussions on alternative, more attractive, commercial arrangements.

Sophisticated Financial Models for Financial Services clients:

Two of our clients had realised that their internally developed financial models were becoming cumbersome and did not capture all of the requirements of the business processes they fitted into.
  • Often complex business transactions or processes are entered into, but translating them into a clear financial models for tracking and/or forecasting is difficult, or the models evolve in an ad-hoc manner.
  • Using both our experience of understanding how business processes work, and building complex financial simulations, we are able to provide clients with lasting models that correctly simulate their internal processes or business transactions on an ongoing basis.
  • Each model is bespoke, and delivers exactly what the business needs in a simple way. Since we fully understand the business process that it models, we can hand hold through use if needed, and can also provide support to deal with any exceptions.

Pricing and Promotion Strategy for a leading Premium Drinks company:

The common scenario of regular, heavy discounting with little understanding of the net benefits, led this company to seek support in providing accurate insight into volume and pricing that would inform the planning of future promotions.
  • Significant discounts were given to consumers in this competitive spirits category, but without a clear understanding of the complex interactions of multiple brands promoting simultaneously they were unable to predict the volume, and profit, benefits from each promotion run.
  • Using proven statistical techniques, we quantified the relationship between the levels of pricing and promotional activity and resulting volume gains. By combining this with detailed promotional economics (total cost of promotion, brand owner/retailer funding mechanisms and product contributions) we delivered an easy to use tool that enabled the client to evaluate the volume and profit impact of future promotions.
  • With this tool our client has been able to improve the efficiency of its sales and marketing budgets by ensuring promotional objectives (volume and value) are achieved whilst employing the most effective promotional mechanisms. The fully quantified analysis also ensures a robust negotiating platform for discussions with the trade.

Purchasing Benchmarking between leading UK wholesaler and retailer:

Faced with an ever more aggressive retail environment, these clients wanted to understand the precise benefits of combining purchasing, without revealing sensitive commercial terms to each other.
  • The clients were seeking to combine their purchasing skill and scale to drive down product costs. However, like most organisations, they were reluctant to reveal explicit purchasing terms before they understood what the potential benefits might be.
  • A detailed benchmarking was designed that identified the precise areas and scale of benefits available to each party, without exposing sensitive detail. The analysis detailed supplier/retailer co-funding of consumer promotions, enabling the true benefit, or otherwise, of such funding to be understood.
  • Both parties now have a precise understanding of the potential commercial benefits, and are working together to realise the purchasing synergies.

Strategic category review for leading Premium Drinks company:

Despite being a leading player, our client lacked sufficient insight into the growth and drivers of the market to effectively plan and drive their business.
  • Existing sources of market size and growth differed wildly, contained obvious inaccuracies and lacked the insight or detail required to enable effective market planning.
  • Praeda delivered a precise view of the size and growth of the market and the key competitors. We defined the core volume drivers and established a detailed, consumer-driven category forecasting framework.
  • Armed with this new understanding our client was able to effectively quantify market opportunities and perform a fundamental reassessment of corporate growth targets and investment decisions. The use of tactical marketing funds was reappraised to win market share efficiently. The client was left with tools and frameworks that ensured the analysis remained current, thereby ensuring continuing relevance and value.

Strategic Acquisition for a Frozen Foods producer:

When the opportunity arose to purchase assets and brands of a major competitor, this client needed a robust analysis of how integration would affect their profit delivery.
  • Although not in a core segment of their market, the opportunity to buyout a major competitor still seemed an attractive growth opportunity for our client.
  • Our valuation work demonstrated that the offered brand did not add substantial value to our client, but since it was attracting plenty of interest from competitors the major driver of value was defence of our client’s existing business.
  • Despite mking a favourable offer, which even avoided closure of a factory, the bid was unsuccessful: the target company was offered to a 3rd party.