Good Fundamental Tool for Actual Spend, Some Voids on Planning Capabilities
Overall Satisfaction
Pros
- Enables the allocation across brands of various marketing activities, essential for multi-brand executions that we do freuently.
- Connects seamlessly to IBM Cognos to create comprehensive reports that allow analysts and managers to see their budgets at any given point in time.
- Interface is easy to navigate, with an ability to customize based on your usage needs.
Cons
- Improved forecasting and planning tools, currently Aprimo does not enable teams to easily delineate starting budgets, actual spend, planned spend, and remaining budget.
- Better filtering mechanisms - we rely on text lookups that can easily create problems if employees input misspellings.
- Needs a capability to show snapshots of given points in time, for example, what the budget and plan looks like at the outset of the year vs. halfway through vs. end of year.
- Aprimo enabled our team to efficiently deploy a $10M budget; in prior years we returned unspent funds to the corporation with little ROI benefit
- Increased employee efficiency in researching spend on various programs - allowed our team to leverage one ananlyst vs. two across our pet and consumer business units
Product Usage
50 - Brand Marketing, Marketing Support, Finance, Shopper Marketing
2 - Superuser capability with the software, and a strong working knowledge of how our company integrates software. When we need support, we have to arrange time with an Aprimo consultant to explain any challenges we are having or capabilities we are seeking from the software. Would be excellent if Aprimo offered more in-program training options.
- Managing actual spend against marketing programs.
- Allocating spend by brand for marketing executions and agency retainer payments.
- Tracking invoices against budget amounts for the individual costs within programs.
- Feeding ROI models that provide insight on Shopper Marketing ROIs.
- Generating reports that show the percentage of cost allocated against a given brand across multiple programs.
- Tracking unspent funding that can drop to the bottom line at the conclusion of our fiscal year.
- Planning future spend.
- Improved communication with software used by other cross-functional teams to manage funds collaboratively.
Usability
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Easy to use Technical support not required Feel confident using | Unnecessarily complex Not well integrated Inconsistent Cumbersome Lots to learn |
- Viewing actual invoices against planned budget.
- Percentage cost breakdown by brand.
- Documentation behind each program, and associated costs.
- Searching activites without relying on text lookups.
- Planning spending and future programs.
- Viewing budget spend in a more visually intuitive, non-table format.
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