Matthew Bergum, Director of Power Tools at Bosch Canada
The power tools division of global giant Bosch is known for high standards of performance and innovation. It makes sense that the team in charge of sales and marketing also takes an innovative approach to managing retailer partnerships using data in Alloy.
We recently sat down with Matthew Bergum, Director of Power Tools at Bosch Canada for an interactive webinar. As the Director for Bosch Power Tools in Canada, Matthew shared how his team manages the chaos of data from retail and digital channels, how he drives a more efficient team through automation, and how he’s become a champion for data-driven decision making within Bosch Canada.
Here are the three main takeaways from our webinar with Bosch Canada:
Consolidating all of their retail and ecommerce data in one place for better decision-making had proved a major challenge for Bergum’s team at Bosch. “Every customer will send their data in a different way, whether it’s a flat file or EDI or a different way,” said Bergum. “And they’re all in different formats, some include different information. It’s a mess. We tried to do it on our own. We tried to figure it out how to consolidate it. It was virtually impossible and required a lot of people and resources.”
Alloy’s data platform automated the work of data aggregation — saving the team time and pure man-hours. By pulling in data from ecommerce, multiple retail customers like Loews and Home Depot, and then automatically harmonizing that data, Bosch was able to get them to insights faster.
“Instead of spending all of that time trying to put all the data in one place and format it and clean it up, now our team — the same number of people — can spend that time looking at the data and gaining actionable insights and things that we can actually do with it, versus just trying to understand what it means.”
"Instead of spending all of that time trying to put all the data in one place and format it and clean it up, now our team — the same number of people — can spend that time looking at the data and gaining actionable insights and things that we can actually do with it, versus just trying to understand what it means."
Bosch had traditionally relied on shipment and sell-in data, but that didn’t reflect what was actually happening on the store shelf. And this can often lead to a disconnect when having discussions with retail customers.
Bergum says that, “without Alloy, without really digging into what POS data provides us historically, we’ve really only relied on shipment data, what we have shipped from our warehouse to our retailers and to our customers. And that only really tells a very small part of the story, and it doesn’t allow us to speak intelligently to our customers about their business, their metrics and their targets.
So once we were able to bring all of our data from each individual customer into Alloy, it allowed us and our sales people — when they’re having conversations with their customers, with their merchants, their buyers about programs or line reviews — now we can speak intelligently and talk about the same data that they have in front of them. Without something like Alloy, it was virtually impossible for us to do that.”
Let’s face it, consumer behavior during the pandemic has been anything but normal. And while volatility in consumer demand and supply uncertainty remain, Bosch has noticed that things have begun to settle into a new normal.
When asked what one metric he would look at above all others to determine the health of the business, Bergum had a surprising answer:
“The top box on my dashboard is rolling 52 week sales, 2022 versus 2019. I’m skipping 2020 and 2021 because of all of the exciting things that happened during those years and I really want to keep a pulse on what’s happening versus 2019 as the true health of our business. And so if I had to pick one thing, it’s probably that.”
The question that Bergum gets the most from Bosch’s global leaders? “What’s your in-store sales, what’s your digital sales, and how are those changing?”
During the pandemic, many brands experienced a fast shift from brick-and-mortar sales to ecommerce. And now, as the world re-opens, things are rebounding, but they look a little different.
“What Alloy has helped us that we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise,” Bergum said, “is really watching that shift from brick and mortar to e-commerce. This is something that we spent a lot of time making sure was explicitly clear in our data — separating in-store sales, true brick and mortar sales from all of the other forms of digital, BOPIS (buy online pickup in store), you name it. We really wanted to see all of those separated out so that we had a true look at our business.
“And so, again, I talked about my specific dashboard, another key piece of my dashboard is seeing our year-to-date sales and the percentages of how much of that is happening at brick and mortar, how much of that is happening in digital and BOPIS, and how are those changing year over year. We have seen in ’22, in the last three, four months, we are shifting back to brick and mortar, especially in Canada as lockdowns are lifting up. We now no longer have to wear masks in Ontario. And so we are seeing a lot of that shift back to brick and mortar, however, Alloy also helps us see that our e-comm business is still significantly higher than pre-pandemic.”
Ready to learn more about how Bosch is achieving continued success in retail and digital channels with Alloy? Watch the full webinar replay now!
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