Saving 1 FTE for elho
How elho saves months annually while delivering more value to their retail partners.
From 10 to 25+ data-driven category plans. From 33 different retail data sources and mostly Excel, to near real-time steering. Elho was drowning in data but starving for insights.
Elho is a leading supplier of sustainable plant pots and garden-related products, serving garden centers and (DIY) retailers across 57 countries through 33+ retail channels including Dobbies, Intratuin, Globus, and REWE. With such scale comes enormous data potential. But also enormous data complexity. Before, elho did not have the time to back all their retail category plans with insights. With Captain they do, delivering them more deals.
Elho's category team spent up to 60% of their time harmonizing and crunching data.
Excel files, PDF reports, online portals. Each retailer delivered data differently. As a result only 10 key accounts got proper category plans. Smaller retailers were left with generic approaches.
The team knew they could deliver more. However, the manual chaos made it impossible.
Saved 1 FTE
Unique insights
More deals won
Up to 95% Accuracy
Captain's forecasting models proven up to 95% accuracy in predicting promotional outcomes
Profit impact up to 4%
Improve margins by up to 4% through smarter promotional planning
Reduce waste
Cut promotional overstock and waste by up to 20%
Convincing
Captain empowers category managers to lead with confidence always backed by clear, data-driven insights.
Attractive
From dashboards to visuals, every Captain interface is designed to be intuitive, elegant, and ready to share.
Smart
We use AI and automation to simplify complexity and speed up your workflow.
How Captain Transformed elho's category management
Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets, the trade marketing team decided to work with Captain to do the heavy lifting automatically. Every data source, whether it's an Excel export from a German retailer, a PDF report from a UK DIY store, or a platform from a Dutch chain, is directly uploaded into Captain. The platform's intelligent data harmonization engine maps each product to elho's master data structure, eliminating weeks of manual matching.
What used to require constant updates now happens automatically. Weekly data refreshes replaced the old manual reporting cycle, giving the team near real-time visibility into retail performance across Europe. The dashboards generate presentation-ready visuals that align with elho's corporate branding, cutting out hours of reformatting work.
According to the trade marketing team the biggest shift is having much more time to act on insights and create value instead of crunching data.
Measurable Results
25% time savings, saving elho 1 FTE
25+ category plans instead of 10. All retail channels now get insight backed plans, putting elho in a much better position for negotiations and delivering more deals.
Weekly insights enable proactive steering instead of reactive firefighting
New insights. Pan-European visibility reveals cross-market patterns previously invisible
Self-service access for marketing and sales, save a lot of internal Q&A
From reactive to strategic partner
Elho identifies trends much faster. Product lines showing momentum get accelerated support, while underperformers are proactively optimized or phased out, before they damage profitability. When retailers ask questions, elho responds with near real-time data, positioning themselves as the expert insight partner at the table.
Check out the client case video at elho
Article written by
Roy van Beest
