How Haleon is Building an Insights-Driven Organization with Decision Intelligence

Last month at the 2023 Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, 150+ data & analytics leaders joined our customer session with Haleon—the largest consumer healthcare company in the world (think: Advil, Sensodyne, Tums, etc.)—as they described their journey toward building an insights-driven organization using decision intelligence to increase brand growth and drive efficiency/agility.

This post will recap key takeaways from that session. (Gartner customers can watch the replay here.) To learn how Tellius helps other organizations across various industries accelerate market and commercial insights with automated data analysis, check out this webinar.

But you’re here to hear about Haleon. So let’s go!👇

Written by: Betsy Lillian,

Content Marketing Manager at Tellius

The opportunity at hand

Haleon’s Senior Director of Category Development and Capability/NRM—Jaime Romano—kicked off the session by outlining the opportunity at hand for Haleon to build what the company calls an “insights-driven organization of the future.”

Haleon’s mission is to improve everyday health for billions of people. Their strategy to achieve this is to combine deep human understanding 🧠 with trusted science 🔬 to unlock deeper consumer insights. Analytics plays a major role in gaining deep human understanding in a scientific, data-driven manner.

Jaime explained, “We want to ensure that we’re providing objective insights that help us deliver solutions, services, and advanced capabilities through investments in cutting-edge technology such as AI-driven decision intelligence. These investments drive efficiencies and illuminate a more complete picture of the shopper.”

For the commercial organization to stay ahead, “it’s about driving decision intelligence and leveraging AI to ensure data is at our fingertips a lot quicker,” she said. “This drives curiosity, empowers people to do more themselves, and helps us focus on the most important thing—our customers—while keeping us ahead in this precarious post-Covid environment.”

So much data, so little time

With 35 brands operating in five different categories, Haleon has a ton of data at its disposal.

“You name it—we have it,” Jaime said.

But like most global organizations, there’s not enough time to analyze and get insights from all their data using traditional BI tools and manual reporting—i.e., “digging through dashboards, pulling ad hoc reports, making requests, and waiting on those requests,” as Jaime put it.

In the end, unanswered questions were leading to missed opportunities. For example, during meetings with retailers examining sales performance to identify growth opportunities, analysts in the back of the room tried to manually extract data and answer questions in real time—an unscalable approach that resulted in post-meeting follow-ups, which, in turn, required a roughly two-week process of submitting a request for an analyst to pull, analyze, and format data.

“By then, the meeting was done, and you’re not in the same mindset as you were during the discussion,” she explained, “so the data kind of loses its context and the opportunity might be gone.”

All in all, Haleon needed a solution to get data in the hands of more people, enabling them to access and use insights more easily; make the best use of data, using it when they need it the most and not letting it sit dormant; and, most importantly, save time and resources.

“We wanted to introduce a platform that was really easy to use and allowed quick answers to get us to the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how,’ utilizing multiple datasets,” Jaime said.

Enabling self-service analytics

Using Tellius’ natural language search function, auto-recommended visualizations, and one-click insights, users can now ask Tellius a question and discover insights from the data instantly on their own (i.e., self-service analytics)—without needing to take up the time of a busy analyst.

“It’s a really nice addition to the dashboards that we currently have,” Jaime explained, “mostly because we can move through multiple datasets that are in a silo and get those answers really quickly without having to make a request to an analyst who has to pull multiple reports.”

Another time-saving benefit of Tellius is its built-in automatic alerting of key market changes (e.g., price increases, market share movements, etc.), identifying not only what changed, but why (e.g., key drivers and root causes), underpinning changes. This enables her team to take a proactive approach to changing conditions.

With natural language search capabilities, instantly discoverable insights, and the application of ML to business workflows, Tellius is enabling Haleon’s teams to do more in less time—across the entire company.

“With Tellius at our fingertips, we can just ask the question and get it ourselves,” she said. “That’s a lot easier—and it’s more of a dynamic data conversation—versus ad hoc requests going up and down the funnel.”

Driving a data-driven culture in a new era of consumer behavior

Consumer goods firms need to rely on data these days more than ever as they grapple with inflation, rising costs, and shopper behavior changes.

“I used to know what size I would need to promote at what point in the season—who’s buying it, and where they’re buying it,” Jaime said.

But Covid dramatically changed consumer behavior, forcing companies to lean on data-driven insights rather than instinct or experience.

“Real-time data and analytics is more important than ever,” she said. It used to be “the big eat the small,” Jaime warned, but now it’s “the fast eat the slow.” Emerging, nimble companies are proving successful because of their ability to move with speed.

“Sometimes being such a giant in the industry slows you down,” she explained. “So if we can bring on tools that enable us to make faster decisions and move with speed, that’s really how we’re going to keep pace and beat the competition.”

Fostering curiosity and driving new opportunities

Another topic Jaime touched on was the importance of fostering curiosity at your organization. If you consider the number of times each day you use Google or Siri in your personal life, why wouldn’t you apply that same simple practice in the workplace?

Curiosity—with the help of decision intelligence—helps you be more knowledgeable about the organization and, ultimately, unlock new business opportunities, she said.

“Oftentimes we have questions, but we fail to seek the answers because it’s just too difficult,” she added. “We really limit our knowledge as a result of this, which is quite unfortunate. But what if you could just access data and have it at your fingertips straight away?”

A noticeable change with Tellius

Building an insights-driven organization of the future doesn’t require as much change as it sounds on the surface. Despite having a ton of data and different analytics platforms, Jaime pointed out that Haleon “doesn’t necessarily have to change behavior or align different departments and change the systems that we use.”

“Tellius is a nice ‘plus-one’ versus having to replace our whole operating model,” she said.

Yet the increased agility, speed, and self-service nature that Tellius brings to generating vital business insights will be noticeable at Haleon and is accelerating its data-driven culture.

“That’s the definition of being insights-led. If you could produce those insights on demand, why wouldn’t you?”

To learn more about taking your first step toward decision intelligence, request a demo today.