What is data harmonization? A CPG Guide

Key Takeaways

• Single source of truth: Data harmonization creates unified, analytics-ready intelligence from fragmented data sources across your operations

• Competitive advantage: CPG companies using harmonized data make faster, more accurate decisions in today's competitive retail landscape

• ROI impact: Streamlined data processes reduce costs while improving promotional spend optimization and revenue growth management

• Omnichannel excellence: Essential for retailers managing both brick-and-mortar and e-commerce operations across diverse markets

• Operational efficiency: Eliminates data silos and manual processes that slow down consumer goods companies

• Future-ready: Scalable solutions that adapt to evolving retail trends and emerging data sources

• From data swamp to data lake: data harmonization clears fragmented, siloed data into a unified, analytics-ready source of truth.

Executive Summary

Consumer Goods (CPG) companies frequently struggle with fragmented data across physical and digital storefronts. The result? Inefficient ‘data swamps’. Data harmonization solves this challenge by merging disparate sources, formats, and naming conventions into a single, unified database.

By establishing a single source of truth, this automated process eliminates operational silos and drastically reduces manual reporting times, such as Scholl’s 99.99% reduction in data management processes. Reports that used to take two weeks, now complete in minutes.  Specialized software, like TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics, empowers manufacturers to deliver actionable retail insights, optimize promotional spend and make faster, more accurate decisions that drive profitability. 

What is data harmonization? A quick guide

Data is like water – it’s everywhere and it takes many different shapes. When collected and stored properly, you have a clear and easy to navigate data lake – where you can swim in incredible insight. But things get a little murky when there are formatting issues, duplicates, junk and missing data. Suddenly your crystal clear data lake becomes a stagnant data swamp full of disorganized raw data. 

In a data swamp, you can’t easily see all of your raw data or make sense of it. You can’t glean good insights. So how can you clean up the swamp? The answer is simple – data harmonization.

Data harmonization at a glance

Let’s start with the basics. Data harmonization enhances the quality and integrity of your business’s data by creating a single source of truth through advanced data processing. 

How data harmonization works

Data harmonization makes your business data “analytics ready” by bringing together disparate and various data sources, verticals, file formats and naming conventions into a single database and then reorganizing it all into a single schema. Your data is gathered, organized and centralized to become visible in a single, comprehensive data view. It is customizable and your view can be automated and analyzed with dashboards.

It’s an ongoing process

Data harmonization needs to be maintained to keep your past, present and future data easy to access, understand and analyze. This includes continuously validating your data points across channels to ensure metric comparisons are accurate. It also means regularly creating new attributes to enhance analysis when new data sets and/or information is added.

Why is data harmonization important?

When well executed, data harmonization gives you a complete view of your business performance. It empowers your business with high quality data and insights that can help you win online and in store. This is incredibly valuable for manufacturers like consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies that tend to be omnichannel. 

Not harmonizing data is risky business

It’s a huge challenge for omnichannel CPGs, operating brick-and-mortar businesses and online stores, to get a complete and clear view of their business performance. They need to scavenge their data from multiple sources across a physical and virtual landscape. When you gather, store and analyze parts of your data separately, you miss major connections. 

CPG manufacturers typically manage data from multiple disparate sources including syndicated data, POS, consumer panels, trade spend and shipment data. Without data harmonization, this data is siloed, disorganized and inconsistently formatted. This can lead organizations to make bad decisions, lose sales and experience instability. 

For instance, a brand may have accurate brick-and-mortar sales and accurate data for its digital sales, but no clear way to view them together. A product may be underperforming online but overperforming in stores within the same area or  region, but with no unified view, any insights or patterns to understand why remain hidden. When evaluating product performance then, teams make channel-specific decisions rather than understanding how offline and online actually interact with each other. 

The fix? A data set that showcases performance as one connected channel, rather than two separate reporting tracks.

What data harmonization software does

Data harmonization software gives you that much needed holistic view of your business’s performance. It fosters easy data analysis and comparison across different data sets by converting them into a common standard. When used properly, the software:

• Acquires data from multiple sources. Sources may include market (syndicated), consumer (research and loyalty), trade and revenue trends, account (shipments, POS sales, store level information), trade/RGM (baseline, promotion), product (master data, pricing), external (such as weather) and other (e.g. currency rates).

• Ingests data. The data is gathered and stored in a combined, cleansed, centralized source.

• Harmonizes and customizes data. The harmonization process includes extraction (reading the data in the original data set), conversion (changing its format) and writing (incorporating the data into a new central database). The information is then blended together using machine learning and a “rules engine”. For example, an item that has a different description in three different data sources will be adjusted to have a consistent description and performance, and will be viewable in one place.

• Enriches data. Custom market metrics like productivity are used to index an item’s velocity performance to the segment or category.

• Analyzes data. Analysis unlocks actionable insights by channel, brand and customized subsegments. 

Data harmonization vs data standardization: what's the difference?

While often used interchangeably, data standardization and data harmonization serve distinct roles in your analytics strategy. Standardization focuses on establishing uniform formatting within a single dataset. Harmonization goes much further, blending entirely separate data sources into one unified view. Essentially, standardization is just the first step toward achieving full data harmonization.

How data harmonization enhances your business

Data harmonization offers a lot of value for CPGs. Once you harmonize your data, you will enjoy:

• Data-driven insights. More accurate data leads to clearer and more accurate insights that you can leverage to scale your business and optimize promotional dollars. 

• Key performance indicators (KPIs). Easier to identify KPIs by channel, brand and other customized segments help you pave a path to success.

• A clear view of your performance. A simplified, consolidated view of how your products are performing will enhance your decision making.

• More accurate reporting. Trustworthy data leads to better reporting that could potentially save your business a ton of money. 

• Centralized data. Reduced data confusion and disparate data improves efficiency and a single master database enables you to access everything you need.

• Expense reductions. Data harmonization boosts your bottom line by saving your team time and enhancing the quality and usability of your data and insights. 

• Enhanced efficiency. Your team can work faster and focus on their priorities instead of getting lost in data silos. . 

• Centralized data governance. Data harmonization enables centralized data governance – a top-down model where one group or team within your organization sets and implements data governance strategy, policies and standards; monitors compliance; and ensures data quality. This approach makes adapting to major changes and shifts within your organization easier.

Why your CPG company needs data harmonization software

Without data harmonization software, it’s challenging for CPGs to extract accurate and impactful insights from their disparate data. This can lead to poor analysis and questionable decision making. 

CPG companies that don’t harmonize their data are operating in a data swamp. They need to collect, store and analyze their data sets on an ongoing basis from a variety of sources, including: 

• Retail syndicated and POS data

• Consumer and shopper panel data 

• ePOS

Data harmonization software can do a lot of the heavy lifting and empower CPGs to make sense of their data. 

What problems do CPGs face without data harmonization?

Inconsistent Product Data Across Retailers

When selling through multiple channels, a single SKU often arrives with mismatched names, sizes, or categories depending on the retailer’s data feed. This fragmentation stalls accurate performance comparisons and forces teams into manual spreadsheet reconciliation.

The fix requires automated data matching. By using machine learning to automatically resolve these naming discrepancies into one standardized description, brands gain true apples-to-apples visibility.

Delayed and Inefficient Reporting

By the time manual performance reports are compiled, the next promotional cycle has already begun. Analysts waste days extracting data from syndicated, POS, and trade spend spreadsheets, leaving no time to actually act on the insights.

The fix is centralized, automated data ingestion. Once source data is automatically cleaned and structured into a single schema, reports build themselves instantly.

Solutions like TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics are able to solve these problems head-on, able to standardize product-level inconsistencies and provide automated reports based on multiple data sets.

How to choose the right data harmonization software for your business

New data harmonization tools are regularly introduced, so as a consumer you need to determine which tool best fits your business model. 

What to look for:

When selecting a data harmonization software solution for your business, it’s important that the software you choose can handle: 

• Managing original data sets from diverse retail sources

• Data transformation capabilities for complex integrations

• Presentation tools for executive reporting

• Analytics functionality for actionable insights

• Harmonization at scale for enterprise operations

Many companies invest in software that specializes in one, but not all, of these areas. This leads to less effective data harmonization and missed opportunities in the US market.

TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics

When it comes to which data harmonization software solution to choose, TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics ticks all the boxes. It’s a top-tier solution built for CPG manufacturers by industry experts. It’s designed to harmonize data and adapt to each company’s unique needs.

Key features

TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics enables you to:

• Harmonize your data from multiple sources

• View your business more holistically across all channels

• Get started with minimal set up 

• Easily customize the software to your needs as you go

It empowers your business to view your data across multiple platforms, including:

• QuickTABS. A user-friendly reporting tool based in Excel, similar to a pivot table but more powerful.

• Account Insights. A custom data integration strategy and dashboard that integrates retailer-specific point of sale data, electronic data interchange feeds, shipment and financial forecasts.

• Market Insights. A tool that uses market-level data from Nielsen, IRI, and SPINS.

• Promo Insights. A dashboard that shows promotional spending analysis.

• Presentation Builder. A presentation platform that allows you to present your findings internally or to your buyers using visuals.

If you’re ready to enhance your business decisions, unify data and get a clear view into your performance, it might be time to try data harmonization software. 

Want more information on how TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics can help you master data management with data harmonization? Request a demo with our experts today to learn more about the data harmonization process and the unique features and benefits of TELUS Revenue Growth Management Analytics.