______________________________________________________________________________ Main Interview – Aroma360
the question becomes forward-looking: what are we seeing that predicts where the business is heading, and what can we do now to influence that trajectory? That is a fundamentally different managerial posture, and it requires both the infrastructure to support it and the analytical culture to act on what it surfaces. At Aroma360, the business intelligence systems I have built are designed specifically to enable that forward-looking conversation at the executive level. Leadership can see store-level performance, product mix, conversion patterns, and cost dynamics on a current basis, which means capital allocation decisions are made based on present reality rather than a month-old approximation of it.”
The supply chain work Alexandra has led at Aroma360 illustrates this approach well. When she joined the business, the working capital position across its product supply chain was not visible in a way that connected the cash commitment at each stage to the overall liquidity picture. Conventional reporting showed margins and revenue, but did not make clear the large amount of cash sitting locked in the pipeline at any given time, cash that was committed well before goods arrived and payment terms had elapsed. By building a cash flow model that mapped the full journey from procurement through to customer receipt, it became possible to see the scale of the working capital constraint and precisely where in the supply chain cash was being held and for how long. That visibility was the precondition for the renegotiations that followed, and the financial release was substantial, running into millions of dollars per month. A similar dynamic applied to Aroma360’ s logistics cost structure, where modelling the full picture of what was being paid and why revealed that inherited contractual arrangements were more expensive than a better-structured agreement would have been. In both cases, the insight came from building an analytical framework that made existing data coherent
and decision-relevant for the first time.
As Alexandra emphasizes, financial intelligence is not a mere back-office function, it is the infrastructure through which a retail business understands itself.“ When it is built well, it changes what gets measured as well as what gets decided and how quickly. The businesses navigating the current environment most effectively are those where the finance and data function is connected to strategy, where performance is understood continuously rather than reconstructed in arrears, and where the people making commercial decisions have the analytical clarity to act with conviction. It is a question of how seriously an organization treats the discipline of knowing, precisely and on a current basis, what is true about its own performance,” she ends.
Alexandra’ s analysis shows that the retailers who will navigate the next decade most effectively are those who have built the discipline to know exactly what their data is actually telling them. ■
Alexandra Okrent www. aroma360. com
retail-merchandiser. com 11