Owens Corning Analytics 50 Submission

Business Challenge

A large customer of Owens Corning sells a significant percentage of its core products in stores across the U.S. Owens Corning’s salesforce for this customer monitors sales and takes action at stores that need attention. The scope of stores to monitor by the sales teams tends to be fairly large and varied.

The sales managers had to manually search through point of sale (POS) data to find stores with unusually low/high sales. They also had to navigate multiple detailed reports, and it was time consuming and inefficient. For example, 10 percent of the stores would generally take between six and seven hours. Visiting all stores frequently was not possible, leading to missed opportunities and timely action.

Analytics Solution

Sales managers needed an alert to focus on specific stores to analyze/visit and to ask the right questions of the right store. The solution built was an easy-to-use report/analytics called the “Fish Finder.” The solution was built with statistical analysis on the POS data from each store, with detailed analysis on an individual store level.

Each week the sales managers receive an email alert with a list of stores with statistically high or low sales—the outliers. The outlier report was integrated into a front-end Power BI-based analysis that included visual geo-analytics, regression and trending, and drill down capabilities for finer details.

Impact

Owens Corning’s use of Fish Finder provided the following successes:

• Increased accuracy of finding stores with problems: From many to only 15-20 stores with outliers in sales
• Shortened time for analysis: From eight to 10 hours of data crunching to 15 minutes to review outliers
• Speed to action: Reduced from weeks to minutes
• Differentiation: Knowing more about Owens Corning products sold in stores, helping customers win business
• Productivity of commercial teams: Stories about how Fish Finder is making a difference