Animalytix is a first of its kind venture for the animal health industry, serving as a state of the art business intelligence platform for both its subscribers and data providers. Unlike other services, Animalytix delivers its geo-located market survey data to both manufacturers and distributors, making it possible for all participating parties to use enhanced market knowledge to drive improved business performance.
Animalytix concluded its first year of operations with successfully capturing $15b in geo-located sales transactions made to more than 145,000 veterinarians, retailers and livestock producers dating from 2006. This expansive database representing sales information covering 6,200 products from 500 manufacturers is used by Animalytix produce 10 ruminant, 2 equine and 4 small animal market surveys each month.
In addition to the monthly ALYXSM Market Surveys, Animalytix offers the Animalytix Customer Transactional (ACTSM) Records Reporting Platform which provides detailed sales transaction data to its subscribing manufacturers. ACT reports are processed daily and can be delivered on either a weekly or monthly basis, providing timely and highly robust sales transaction data suitable for monitoring sales rep performance, distributor performance goals and settlement of customer rebates.
Another advance for the Animalytix platform was the introduction of the proprietary Smart Sort™(patent pending) methodology, a business intelligence tool capable of tracking sales performance by product or by manufacturer among 23 distinct customer types including 7 veterinary (equine, swine, ruminant and small animal specialty; mixed, companion and large animal); 3 retail (ag retail, tack shops and consumer pet); and 9 distinct types of livestock production operations (dairy, feedlot, cow/calf, stocker, calf ranch, dairy heifer grower, swine, and sheep/goat). For the first time ever, manufacturers can now make granular assessments of sales across species types and even stratified samples of customer segments.
Thanks to the combination of available data, proprietary methodologies and an experienced staff of senior operators from the animal health manufacturing and distribution sectors, Animalytix is uniquely qualified to assist its clients in assessing a variety of critical commercial issues including sales force productivity and deployment strategies, the effectiveness of marketing investments and even long-range forecasting and trending analysis for individual products or segments.
2012 will bring an even greater expansion of capabilities for the Animalytix platform with the introduction of several new reports including swine vaccines and pharmaceuticals, diagnostics kits and consumables, sutures, white goods and fluids among others. As importantly, Animalytix is undergoing a significant expansion of its data provider’s network with several new participants planned for inclusion yet during the first and second quarter of this year. Ivesco, Merritt Veterinary Supply, Micro Beef Technologies, Midwest Veterinary Supply, PCI, Sioux Nation, Valley Vet and several members of the AgriLabs distribution network are currently in the process of on-boarding their historical sales data. As these data sets are validated and released for production, they will be merged with the current sales data from Animal Health International, Inc., Butler Schein Animal Health, MWI Veterinary Supply, Nelson Laboratories, Professional Veterinary Products and Webster Veterinary to provide animal health manufacturers and others with an interest in animal health with the most robust business intelligence platform ever offered for this industry.
We would like to thank each of our subscribers and our data providers for their support this past year and reaffirm the commitment of the Animalytix team to continue our efforts to expand the scope of our data network and the capabilities of our platform. Our focus remains the relentless development of tools designed to drive improved performance business for our subscribers and data providers. We look forward to assisting each of our subscribers and the members of our data provider’s network in realizing that goal.
Sincerely,
Chris Ragland
CEO, Animalytix LLC
Every company wants to be financially successful. But, what does that mean? Are you a success any time you beat earning expectations or sales versus the previous year or the previous quarter? What if you improved your top line by 75%? Is that good enough for first place in your division? It might be, but it all depends on what the competition is doing.
Many organizations have a tendency to measure performance based on prior year’s results. This is a legitimate measure and has some utility as a measure of performance, but it lacks context. Current sales versus previous year’s sales focus strictly on internal metrics and are poorly suited to evaluate the true competitive status of an organization. Companies must always look externally to know the real market potential and their relative position within a market.
Let’s take a page from America’s pastime: baseball. My beloved Orioles finished in last place in the American League East last year. As of 8 June, they were having a much better season this year, improving their winning percentage 75% from the same point in the season last year — .276 to .483. In 5 out of 6 MLB divisions, this .483 took them out of the basement and gave them some hope of making a playoff run; sounds like a success.
Hold on a minute — with Boston and New York over .600 and the next to last team in the division, Toronto, hovering near .500, the O’s are still firmly in last place in the AL East and have virtually no chance to be in the hunt for a title. Furthermore, they have tanked over the last month; as of the All-Star break, they dropped to .409. Unfortunately for me, this shatters my initial elation over a huge double-digit improvement.
Baseball is the king of leveraging numbers and statistics, and this is a simple example. But, what if you could measure your company’s sales performance within the various ‘divisions’ and territories and know if you are moving the needle to a 1st or 2nd place finish? Fortunately now you can with the ALYX Market Survey Reporting Series, and since it is published monthly, you can keep an eye on the progress and make sure it is not falling off the cliff, like the O’s.
The latest Animalytix in Action case study, a Sales Force Effectiveness Evaluation, clearly demonstrates the power of analyzing sales performance within local markets. The study demonstrates the importance of evaluating performance at the most relevant level. Is the 23% market share in Territory #10 another great success, or more of a late season hitting slump? Take a look at the study and see how Animalytix can help you determine the true performance of your sales team.
And remember, Animalytix can help you see the field but it’s up to you whether you’re ready to play ball.
Bryan Gathagan, Senior Information Advisor
Back in the late ‘90s, I made a career change and encountered a bit of a shock. Like many of today’s financial and IT professionals in animal health, my professional education and experience was far removed from the veterinary and agricultural professions. In my case, it was mortgage-backed securities, credit cards, and teaching at the university level. You can’t get much different.
Being fresh out of Business school and having been a part of a great team that helped propel MBNA’s meteoric rise into a credit-card industry powerhouse, my focus was delivering measurable results based on facts, evidence, and data. Our timelines at MBNA had been measured in days, not weeks, months or years, so ready access to volumes of reliable market intelligence was both standard operating procedure and critical to our efforts. Upon transitioning to animal health, I quickly realized the access to market insight would not support the Porsche-like speeds we were accustomed to in the banking industry. There was soon no doubt that then it came to market intelligence, animal health was going to be an “off-road” experience, complete with the potholes, washed out gullies and other obstacles along the way.
The practical implications were soon apparent. No matter the nature of the financial exercise, be it the development of discounted cash flows, budget projections, promotional campaign justifications or capital investments, the underlying financial assumptions were more intuitively than objectively based. Senior management explained their over-reliance on “intuition” and “gut reactions” was due, in large part, to the lack of credible market information. Through the whole experience, I felt like we were driving down the road with little or no instrumentation. Absent good data, we were driving blind and exposed to any number of poor business outcomes, all stemming from an inability to measure true performance.
Fast-forward to today, a financial executive entering the animal health industry now encounters a very different situation. Not only have internal systems improved significantly thanks to the adoption of SAP and similar platforms, access to meaningful sales information has recently improved as well. With the introduction of the Animalytix®, CFOs, Controllers and other financial officers now have a wealth of market intelligence at their fingertips.
Thanks to Animalytix®, it is no longer necessary to base key decisions primarily on subjective evaluations or “gut instincts.” With more than $12 bln in historic market information coving 5+ years and more than 147,000 vets, livestock producers, retailers, and other customers, robust market intelligence is now available for a broad array of market segments. For critical decisions, financial executives can now rely on timely, comprehensive and fact-based market information, delivered in a format specifically designed for their operational requirements.
So if you are responsible for the financial operations of your company, and you have an interest in moving your market intelligence platform from “off-road” to the Information Superhighway, take Animalytix® for a spin. Let us show you how to put our tachometers to work helping you remove the guesswork in your daily operations and driving greater performance from your organization.
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