Agricultural giant discovers $500 million value in digital product over 5 years

Our Impact

Monetizing data creates advantages in a digital economy. This Fortune 100 agricultural manufacturer is leading the charge in becoming a smart industrial enterprise that can meet those goals—committing significant investment in a data and analytics structure to deliver on its vision. Our client also wanted to understand the value derived from those investments to ensure it was delivering on its potential and to justify future actions. That’s why they turned to West Monroe.

We brought widely regarded thought leadership on the topic of data monetization and value creation, as well as the multidisciplinary capabilities for translating this into a practical application. That meant we could work quickly; in just weeks, we produced a framework for measuring the value of existing investments and used it to quantify hundreds of millions in value—with more to come.

The Full Story 

The Challenge

Our client’s data and analytics organization includes teams aligned to business units or functional areas across the company. These teams have invested significantly in data analytics products to support the organization’s smart industrial vision, but their distributed operating model limits visibility into the specific data products in use and both the business opportunities they support and the value those create. 

Because data products don’t create value unless they are applied to the right use cases, our client wanted a sound and consistent approach for quantifying the value its investments in analytics created—to justify both existing investments and future requests for new funding. 

When executives heard West Monroe’s Innovation Fellow Doug Laney present about the economics of information—or “Infonomics”—they immediately wanted to know more.

An Undeniably Different Approach

Infonomics is grounded in the philosophy of treating data as an asset to maximize its value. Its innovative principles have helped organizations uncover billions of dollars in untapped value in their data assets. By pairing Laney, the author of Infonomics, with multidisciplinary team of data/analytics, industrial products, and customer solutions experts, we turned this concept into a practical solution tailored to their business needs. 

First, we met with analytics leaders from across the organization to understand the data products they use today. While most of our work involved in customer analytics, we talked with an array of teams—such as aftermarket and smart factory—to ensure the solution would be relevant across the organization. 

We then created a framework that allows the company to see where value is created and realized. At the bottom of the hierarchy are their data assets and the data analytics products in which it has invested. Both layers have potential value to the organization—but that value is only identified when a team uses data assets and a data product to address a particular business scenario (“use case”). Finally, the company realizes that value when digital products apply the insight created. We created a financial model—providing them with a tool they can use to calculate value and attribute it to specific data products in which it has invested.

To demonstrate to our client how this works, our team used the framework we developed to analyze and quantify three examples: 

1. Their new digital product has the potential to generate over $500 million in value over five years by increasing conversion rates and promoting cross-selling for dealers in the US. 
2. Their Adobe Analytics personalization product has the capability to improve the customer journey and create more than $50 million in value. Through better targeted marketing, e-commerce recommendations, and segmentation for Google Ads, it can drive a sales lift of 10%. 
3. The unified customer data product increases marketing spend efficacy by 20-30% by providing a 360-degree view of the customer across sales, marketing, and customer service initiatives.

Real Results

Our client can now quantify, with confidence, the value derived from its multi-million-dollar investment in data analytics across the organization—allowing it to determine which investments and use cases create the greatest value. With this framework, analytics teams across the business can also justify and prioritize future investments and use cases—both new ideas and additional investments in existing ideas—that advance the goal of becoming a smart industrial company. 

Because it now has a mechanism for quantifying the value of its data, they can begin to think bigger—pursuing more advanced data monetization strategies. 

West Monroe’s expertise and partnership resulted in an important new tool for our client to accelerating its digital leadership and its path to becoming a smart industrial enterprise.