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Tim
Callahan
President
ACNielsen North America
Keeping Up With Change
“If you don’t like change, you’re going
to like irrelevance even less,” said retired General
Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army. The world around
us is changing so fast that many in the consumer packaged
goods industry are being challenged to keep up 24/7.
At ACNielsen, we embrace transformational changes because
they create a culture of continuous improvement. This is thanks,
in large part, to the long-standing partnerships that we enjoy
with both retailers and manufacturers. These are focused on
providing five critical client delivery imperatives: 1) more
complete market views; 2) more predictive capabilities; 3)
more integrated views of the consumer; 4) more acknowledgement
as a trusted advisor; and 5) more clear return on investment.
Over the past eight months, the management teams at VNU and
ACNielsen have undertaken a review of our entire North America
business with the objective of sustaining and growing our
market-leading position. This includes investing in and improving
our technology and processes to become more integrated in
a “One VNU” approach to business. The implementation
has already begun and will be completed over the next three
years.
We anticipate a minimal impact to clients in day-to-day activities,
but
substantial benefits over the long term as we move to provide
more advanced insights and business solutions to address your
specific opportunities and challenges.
Our focus on world-class client service—new tools, capabilities,
products, deliverables and insights—means that we need
to reduce the amount of time our associates spend on administrative,
redundant, and non–value-added activities. We have project
teams addressing these areas and we have work plans in place
that will enable associates to spend more time providing insights
and analyses.
All this effort is designed to provide us with the ability
to invest back into the business—investments that will
result in the creation of new platforms that leads to flexible
open environments where our proprietary store and consumer
data can be combined with client proprietary data to provide
more complete business solutions. We also look to invest in
the development of more solution-based products and services.
And thanks to our global footprint, we intend to apply best-demonstrated
practices across the globe, such as:
- Leveraging the broad retail relationships in Canada to
help move beyond traditional CPG coverage (toys, electronics,
etc.)
- Adopting the new Internet deliverable options developed
in Europe to add to our robust set of client delivery options.
- Applying factory redesign work in the U.S., Canada, and
Europe to facilitate more efficient global reporting/integration.
- Sharing the brand equity work undertaken in Asia-Pacific
with both retail and manufacturer clients.
- Expanding our world-class custom research capability beyond
Asia Pacific.
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