Merisant, the maker of tabletop sweeteners Equal and PureVia, serves the retail and food service channels. With 200+ customers and more than 1000 promotional deals every year to plan and promote for in the US alone, managing all that information in Microsoft Excel had become impossible.
In 2009, a year into a project to develop a custom system wrought with delays and budget overruns, Merisant called in a Trade Marketing consultant to assess the situation. After a two-month audit, the recommendation was clear: “There is no doubt that Merisant needed such a tool to optimize its promo spending and to support better demand planning, with visibility on promo volume fluctuations.”