Before adopting Shark, VusionGroup faced inefficiencies and inconsistencies due to disconnected Excel models and manual presentation processes that limited collaboration and slowed customer engagements. Since integrating Shark, they’ve seen major improvements in speed, flexibility, knowledge sharing, and customer credibility, enabling teams to deliver tailored, professional outputs with ease.
VusionGroup is a global leader in retail technology, specialising in the digital transformation of physical stores through IoT, AI, and cloud-based solutions. They provide smart retail systems such as electronic shelf labels, real-time shelf monitoring via computer vision, and data-driven platforms for pricing, inventory, and in-store engagement. These technologies help retailers increase operational efficiency, reduce stockouts and waste, and create more responsive, intelligent store environments.
Serving over 350 major retail groups worldwide, VusionGroup's clients include Walmart, Carrefour, Sephora, Euronics and Co-op. By transforming traditional retail spaces into smart, connected ecosystems, VusionGroup plays a key role in helping retailers compete in an increasingly digital and data-driven market.
Like many organisations, VusionGroup relied on Excel to develop business cases. However, this unstructured and uncontrolled approach resulted in multiple versions of Excel models circulating across the business, each with differing assumptions and calculations. The lack of a centralised platform limited knowledge sharing, making it difficult for teams to build on one another’s work. As a result, valuable insights and lessons learned were often lost or underutilised.
Outputs were another challenge that VusionGroup faced. They would pull data from the Excel-based model and then manually create PowerPoint presentations to present to the customer. Any changes or refinements requested by the customer meant revisiting both the model and the presentation to ensure consistency. Resulting in a frustrating, time-consuming, and error-prone process.
VusionGroup knew they needed to adopt a consistent, flexible and user-friendly approach so they looked for a new solution.
In 2024, following a successful pilot program, VusionGroup formally started their Shark Finesse journey by integrating the Shark platform into their Value Engagement process. This process begins by identifying the customer’s key challenges and opportunities, followed by a collaborative discovery phase. Sales, pre-sales, and account management teams (who are supported by the Value Assessment team), lead this engagement. After the discovery, the Value Assessment team works closely with the customer to build a tailored value model for the VusionGroup solution.
We spoke with David Morgan about how VusionGroup are using the Shark platform in direct customer engagements, and the key challenges it has helped them overcome:
We get multiple stakeholders in, and we actually walk them through every step in the value assessment, so we go through benefit by benefit, looking at the assumptions and it's fantastic. We get really great engagement from that and then we'll use the business survey function after the workshop to send to a few key stakeholders to get them to start refining, feeding back. The idea is that we end up with something that the customer feels is theirs, they own it.
It's given us the speed and the flexibility we needed, it's given us the ability to get that knowledge sharing. So quite often what we will do is, a colleague might say look I've got this situation, have we done something similar and I can just share a model with them?
The really big challenge that it's solved, is getting this credible professional output to customers and re-doing it if we need to. I don't feel uncomfortable now about running multiple scenarios so when someone says, ‘look we want to look at three different ways we could run this, how we could move ahead’. I don't have any concerns about doing that. I'll create a model, I'll duplicate it. Do the variations, produce the output. There you go. There's your outputs. That's solved a huge, huge challenge for us.
The credibility that it establishes with the customer is a whole new level. Everybody responded well to the spreadsheets we did before, but it's still at the end of the day a spreadsheet and it's going to have things wrong with it. But when you present what we can present now, we demonstrate the tool itself, walking through the benefits within the platform, people just respond to it really, really well.
<div class="blockquote-author">David Morgan, SVP Global Value Assessments at VusionGroup.</div>
There's lots of bits of it I really love. If I was forced to say you can only pick one, I would probably pick the output generation because that was such a pain before and it's just so easy to say, ‘Right, here's your PowerPoint. Here's your spreadsheet.’ I love the fact you can click on the little plus sign on the spreadsheet and it opens up what the calculation and the assumptions were. And that really impresses people.
One of the things that we do if we're actually working with a new client, where we want to convince them to work with us on value assessment process, is to send them an anonymised, generic version of a value assessment that's relevant to their business. When they see the quality and professionalism of the output they're going to get, that really convinces them that yes, I will put the effort into sharing the data you need and doing a workshop because they know what they're going to get at the end of it. There are other features of Shark I like a lot, but I think that would probably be the one I'd put at number one.
Very easy to work with, easy to customise. Good relationship with the organisation, so you've got all the kind of ingredients you need to get going with something that's very flexible. And I would feel confident that most, if not all, businesses could adapt it to the unique elements of what they have as an organisation. Whatever their products and solutions.
I think all those things, the flexibility, the ease to work with the tool, and importantly to work with Shark Finesse as a company, I'd recommend on that basis.
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