Reference system architecture for trade promotion management: leveraging business intelligence technologies and decision support systems

Working towards gaining competitive advantage and establishing stable relationships with their supply chain intermediaries, fast moving consumer goods companies are currently focusing their attention on intelligent, goal-based funds investment. Traditional trade promotion management systems (TPMS), however, fail to provide the complex, yet flexible analytical functionality required for accurate tracing of promotional effectiveness and optimization of trade promotional spending. Most commonly encountered issues range from unreliable, inaccurate and inconsistent data and low user friendliness of the system to complicated, inflexible and time-consuming reporting. In this paper, we design the first reference system architecture integrating business intelligence technologies with trade promotion management systems, meeting the business needs and rendering high quality reporting services to the end users. Our proposed architecture incorporates a reference trade promotion management process and is the first architecture model extending the in-built functionality of TPMS with BI tools. We outline the theoretical foundations and the design principles of the architecture and evaluate its validity with 19 interviews and one case study following the TOGAF ADM steps. Despite the time restriction for further validation, the architecture is based on extensive academic and industry literature and the evaluation confirmed its potential of solving common issues of current trade promotion management systems.