Amer Sports’ goal is to become a truly data-driven and customer-oriented company by improving their technical data capabilities and by leading a cultural change within their organization. The first steps on this path have already brought impressive results. Now the data-journey continues with agile testing, creating more value for end-users and adapting the company culture to the new ways of working. This all leads to more satisfied customers and better business practices.
Case study Amer Sports
On the path to customer-centric sports experiences
In a nutshell:
- Amer Sports has increased their data capabilities immensely through long-term development work on technology and culture.
- Combining data from sources like sport watches, mobile applications and a sales database has enabled creating accurate and comprehensive customer profiles.
- This customer data is used extensively around the company, from product design to highly targeted marketing and predicting sales.
- New uses for data are being tested through agile testing periods.
In the future, we have to be able to serve our customers even better, so that the consumer doesn’t only get a product from us, but an experience.Marko Orenius, Director Analytics & BI, Amer Sports
Real business benefits from the get-go
The data-journey for Amer Sports began in 2017. The company chose Solita as their strategic and executing partner and adopted Solita’s experts into their data analytics and business intelligence teams. The co-operation started out with strategic work and creating the first concepts together. From there the team started building their data capabilities to bring more transparency to sales, production and supply chain management by building integrations to collect vast amounts of data from different sources into one place.
The result? A predictability tool which provides sales representatives with accurate data on which products should be sold to which vendor at which time. The tool also provides much needed predictability to supply chain management. It has helped reduce the annual cost of materials by millions of euros. This first successful project was proof that utilising data can have a beneficial business impact and bring measurable results.
But this was only the beginning.
There is no denying that there is a big shift coming. The ones that are able to react to the shift are the ones that will thrive.Dave Bucher, Analytics Product Owner, Wilson
Plan, Test, Analyse
To develop new ideas into actual functioning tools, Amer Sports’ and Solita’s team uses agile testing periods. Ideas for these tests come from business units and the quick testing periods will determine whether or not the idea is doable and worthwhile.
As business needs to change rapidly, the demand for quick agile testing is pivotal in staying ahead of the competition and serving the customer better.
“I know that the stuff I’m doing in my work today, I won’t be doing in five years. As the markets change, so do the business needs – and our work. There is no denying that there is a big shift coming. The ones that are able to react to the shift are the ones that will thrive.”
- Dave Bucher, Analytics Product Owner, Wilson
Example use:
- Data-rich customer profiles enable Amer Sports to reach the right customer at the right moment on their customer journey.
- If a runner has bought running shoes that have a recommended lifespan of 500 km, Amer Sports is able to know when the running shoes have reached that point.
- Marketing actions can be focused to audiences of one, instead of large segment-based audiences.
There’s no change without a cultural change
Better data leads to better results. However, if the data is not utilised in the right way, the results will not be any better.
That’s why, to create a real long-lasting impact with data, the whole organization needs to get on-board. Driving this cultural change forward has been a key factor in Solita’s and Amer Sports’ work. Data plays already a big role in product design, sales, marketing and strategic decision making.
“Giving birth to a testing culture has been a crucial part of the work we’ve done. In the future we will speed up the testing process even more and increase the amount of ideas tested.”
Olli Lindroos, Data Business Designer, Solita
As Amer Sports’ data capabilities grew and the business benefits became clear, it was apparent that in order to move forward the organization and ways of working needed to adapt also. And they did just that.
In the beginning of 2018 the data analytics and business intelligence teams were combined to create a new agile team that would serve the needs of different business units while also providing advanced analytics services.
This new team is able to provide accurate insight into customer behaviour to Amer Sports’ marketing team, data to optimize production and material flow as well as better predictability models for sales. These are just a few enhancements that Amer Sports has taken on board in their data-journey.
“In the future, we have to be able to serve our customers even better, so that the consumer doesn’t only get a product from us, but an experience. These experiences can be created for example through mobile applications which combine data and our products. This will take our brand value beyond our competitors’.”
– Marko Orenius, Director Analytics & BI, Amer Sports
Read also Five key learnings that transform data into real business benefits.
Results
- From an idea into production only in a month
- Over 10 ideas tested just within one year
- 4 tested ideas in production
- 13.9 M customer profiles
- Cultural change towards data driven business
Webinar: Tech is easy – culture is hard
