TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sripath has 13+ years of leadership experience in the FMCG Industry working with stalwarts like P&G and NIVEA. He has held multiple responsibilities across Customer, Commercial, Shopper & Digital marketing, currently, leading eCommerce organization for NIVEA India. He is known in the industry as someone who is always driving growth through innovation.
As the Director of eCom at Nivea, what are your primary areas of focus?
My key focus area is to build and execute a comprehensive company-level E-Commerce strategy and drive end-to-end P&L, spanning across topline revenue, EBITDA, and working capital.
This involves aligning different stakeholders across functions internally (Sales, marketing, finance, supply chain) and customers externally leveraging analytics to make both tactical and strategic decisions through data-driven insights.
What are the key problems you solve on a daily basis?
We work with multiple E-Commerce, Q-Commerce, and E-Beauty platforms to get our products across to consumers. In order to build a great shopper experience, we focus on multiple aspects like product availability, visibility, and pricing on the eCommerce shelf and how they interact with the algorithms to drive more shoppers to try our brand.
For example, being on top of sales trends on a daily and weekly level and quickly debugging the root causes of their movement is critical to drive business growth in this fast paced environment. The issue might be with visibility, availability, pricing, or conversions. Identifying and addressing these factors promptly is our priority.
What is your approach to solving those problems? Could you please highlight the data and tools you rely on?
Our team collates data from multiple sources like:
- Marketplace platforms (each with its own way for data sharing and presentation)
- Scraping data
- Marketing data from internal systems
- Finance and invoicing data from tools
Once we create a data hub, we triangulate through these data points using a combination of Excels and dashboards to monitor and take business calls.
What pain points do you encounter when using these data and tools?
Most of these tools are designed to give a top-level, color-coded summaries of business performance.
When confronted with specific business questions, folks in my team navigate through multiple internal dashboards and Excels scattered across various systems to get to answers. Before they can act on actual issues, they end up spending hours over pivot tables.
In case their first level insights need a double-click, they have to repeat the mundane and tedious process. This takes up a lot of valuable bandwidth and moreover impacts our ability to act fast.
As a domain practitioner, do you believe there is room for improvement in terms of efficiency? Are there aspects where you think a better solution could significantly enhance your operations?
My biggest pet peeve has been making life easier, simpler, and more actionable for daily practitioners directly involved in executing tasks.
I strongly believe that business outcomes are closely tied to the team's ability to quickly uncover insights and act upon them promptly. When the process of identifying problems or gaining insights becomes too time consuming, it nudges people to act on gut calls based on rule of thumbs instead of data.
I see a huge advantage in a platform that enables users to ask business questions in simple language. This platform should have the capability to access various data sources to create a single portfolio view, making it easier for practitioners to derive insights without the complexity of navigating multiple systems or dealing with disparate data streams and unleash people to take more actions at speed.
