Okay, Let’s Talk TPx Solutions, CPG – Are You Scalable?

Interview with Joris Monchen – Chief Commercial Officer at Visualfabriq.

Visualfabriq is in its fifth year of operation since the development of our own platform and solutions to help CPG companies to radically transform the ways they execute TPx and improve their profitability. Almost without fail, every time we engage with a CPG company to present our solution, we are asked the question: “Are you scalable?”

Everyone wants to know if we have the capabilities to take our solution into multiple markets. Right? That’s perfectly understandable.

But what typically follows is a list of questions that CPG companies believe test our capacity to be scalable. Questions such as: “How many people do you employ? How many offices do you have? Where are your offices? How many implementations have you done so far across multiple markets? How many partners have you got?”

We call these types of questions, ‘legacy questions’, and they tell us something about the company we are dealing with.

In turn, we have our own question for CPG companies – we also ask: “Are you scalable?”

But when we ask that question, we are not asking for a laundry list to measure up your big size and the length of your track record. Long gone are the days when the capacity to take a solution to scale can be measured in these traditional, outdated ways.

When we ask CPG companies “Are you scalable?” we follow it up with four essential theme questions to test their readiness to implement Visualfabriq’s game-changing solutions:

Question 1: Do you have the leadership and the vision as an organisation to do what it takes to become a leading CPG company of the future?

Do you know what is required for your company to be future fit? Do you have an informed and clear vision of the future? Do you understand how roles and responsibilities need to change now for the future? Do you understand how and what enabling technologies are available to fundamentally transform your business processes now for the future?

Question 2: We have our set technical standard to ensure that we are scalable, but have you defined the corporate blueprint that you want to achieve across all your operations?

Question 3: What is the state of your data readiness?

Do you know where all your data is? Do you have the full picture of all your data sources? Do you know who to turn to, so that all your data can be quickly and easily gathered? Is your data clean, accounted for, available and properly stewarded? What are your processes and procedures that ensure complete data integrity and sustainability?

Question 4: What is your capacity for change management?

Do you have the right people in place to drive a change management initiative and achieve success? Do you have leadership that effectively inspires and supports change? Do you have roles and responsibilities properly structured to facilitate organisational change?

Over the past five years, we have been asking these questions to assess the scalability of some of the biggest CPG companies in the world. What do you think their answers have been? What is your answer? Are you scalable?

The ability to scale up a leading-edge 21st Century tech-solution across multiple markets and multiple geographies is not at all dependent on how many employees and offices the tech supplier might have. It is also not dependent on their track record, nor their longevity in the market because the main virtues of the latest tech include that it is new, young, blindingly fast and globally accessible without the need for many people in many offices in many places.

The issue of scalability is really important, there is no doubt about that. But how we assess the potential for scalability really needs to come out of the Dark Ages.

It is important for you to know whether Visualfabriq is scalable. So, ask us this: How much data can you handle? 

Any volume, velocity and variety of data – this is the measure of our true ability to scale.

But don’t stop there, get in touch, and ask us about our vision too because we know where we are going, where the CPG industry is going and we enjoy talking about it.

Let’s also have conversations about change management. We are rebels with a cause, change-makers with a passion for looking ahead, thinking critically and find exciting paths to take us and our clients forward into a bright future.