Company: BDS Marketing, Inc., Irvine, CA
Company Description: BDSmktg is the marketing agency that delivers sales. Our high-performance teams generate sell-through and our client service specialists offer expertise to enhance your marketing strategy. BDS offers Marketing Analytics, Training & Learning Incentives, Market Development, Performance Selling, Brand Advocacy and Merchandising services.
Nomination Category: Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Maverick of the Year - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: Breaking the Mold: How Sean Wargo, Senior Director of Business Intelligence, Innovated Reporting and Analytics for BDSmktg

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

In the ever-changing retail marketing environment, there is a constant need for information and insights from the retail floor to be delivered back to brands in real time. The faster that brands can see what’s happening in their stores, the sooner they can respond and adjust. However, in an effort to be the fastest and most efficient, the quality and customization of insights often suffer along the way. Many agencies just stop at the data creation and forget to learn from the data provided by a high-functioning analytical effort. Knowing this, Sean Wargo,  Senior Director of Business Intelligence at BDSmktg, invested significant hours outside of his day-to-day responsibilities to spearhead a solution to address this need. His research resulted in the development of a new solution that broke the reporting mold, by efficiently delivering real-time data from the sales floor to clients in a dashboard format, while still providing customized and actionable insights for their brands.

In 2013, Sean and his team laid the groundwork to create an uplifted reporting and insight delivery solution for BDSmktg, by:

1. Centralizing all reporting and analytics: Through careful planning, Sean and the Business Intelligence team raised the bar on their capabilities and achieved operational efficiencies by establishing a central hub for account reporting and analysis.

2. Determining what was important to the client: According to BDS’ competitive intelligence, other agencies use pre-built dashboards that provide little opportunity for customization. Instead, Sean worked directly with a key BDS client, Motorola, to determine their needs and subsequently build out dashboards that reflected the data that mattered most to them, which is now available for BDS’ entire client base. 

3. Implementing an effective, all-in-one dashboard solution: Sean spent endless hours of personal time researching and learning a new reporting platform that the Business Intelligence team was able to integrate into BDS’ proprietary data collection system, Insight:Center™, to provide the dashboards and data customization that clients desire, while still delivering information and insights in a timely manner.

After Sean implemented the new dashboards for Motorola, his team was able to achieve the following results:

•Increase in Operational Efficiency: In the past, the Business Intelligence team spent a large amount of time and energy on just the process of pulling data from its systems, cleaning it, and packaging it for clients. By using the new dashboards, it automated the process of pulling and packaging with very little human involvement week to week, which in turn allowed the analytical team to re-focus 25% of their work day on interpretation of the data and recommendation of tactics.

•Account Performance Improvement: Because of the efficiencies created by using the new dashboards, the Motorola account team has saved 40 hours of work each week. In turn, this time has been reinvested back in the account in other capacities, allowing field managers to focus on their team’s performance and improve visit compliance by 60%.

•Increased Client Satisfaction & Expanded Roll-Out: Motorola has been so impressed by this new level of reporting through dashboards that they have enlisted the BDS team to help roll it out across their global initiatives.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the nominee:

Sean Wargo is responsible for ensuring that all analytics and reporting maintains the highest data integrity, and delivers rich insights to clients. Leveraging his years of expertise and research knowledge, Sean guides all BDS methodology and research design, and serves as a subject matter expert for all account analysts. Throughout his 15 years in the technology research sector, Sean has served in a variety of roles including managing data production, statistical analysis, and directing quantitative and qualitative research projects.

Sean has held positions previously at CEA as Director of Industry Analysis and NPD as a Senior Analyst.