The Situation
FMCG Analytics had spent years building deep retail analytics expertise through consulting, helping brands answer their toughest revenue management questions. By 2022, the founders saw a clear opportunity: turn that expertise into a genuine SaaS product, generating recurring revenue and reaching far more brands without scaling headcount in lockstep.
With strong domain expertise already in place, FMCG Analytics partnered with Halcrow to bring the software product development capability needed to make that vision real, fast.
Why they called us
FMCG Analytics wanted to validate product-market fit quickly and confidently, without committing years of runway to development. They called Halcrow because of our experience building SaaS platforms for analytics companies, and our understanding of exactly what it takes to turn impressive analytics into a product that runs reliably in production for paying customers.
The brief: architect for speed, operationalise FMCG Analytics’s valuable IP into real software, and build a platform resilient enough to scale confidently from day one.
How we worked
A cross-functional team embedded in product development
Halcrow provided a team embedded directly inside FMCG Analytics's product development:
- 1 platform architect handling infrastructure, multi-tenancy, and security
- 2 data engineers building the ETL pipelines and warehouse architecture
- 1 ML engineer responsible for turning the analytics models into production software
- 1 frontend engineer building the self-service dashboard and visualisation layer
- 1 product lead coordinating requirements directly into the roadmap
Working with real, anonymised retailer data from day one, and with direct access to cloud infrastructure, the team moved at the pace the opportunity demanded.
Built in layers on proven foundations
Phase 1: Data Infrastructure (Months 1–4)
We deployed an established cloud data warehouse with multi-tenant isolation built in, and layered a custom ETL pipeline for retail-specific data sources on top — saving at least four to six months of development time.
Phase 2: Analytics Operationalisation (Months 3–8)
Analytics Operationalisation (Months 3–8). We transformed FMCG Analytics’s valuable inventory optimisation, labour forecasting, and demand prediction models from notebooks into automated, scalable, production-grade software. What once took a data scientist two to three days per retailer now runs automatically overnight, with fresh recommendations ready every morning.
Phase 3: Self-Service UI (Months 6–12)
Self-Service UI (Months 6–12). We built a guided onboarding wizard, an intuitive dashboard, custom reporting, and an alert system — all designed around one clear principle: show brands exactly what to do, in plain, actionable terms.
WHAT CHANGED
The product became a real business
By month 14, the platform had onboarded 12 brands and was generating more than $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. The platform held 99.7% uptime, with average query response times under 2 seconds — a genuinely strong foundation for FMCG Analytics’s next phase of growth.
WHY THIS WORKED
what you're buying
If you’re a consulting firm with deep domain expertise ready to turn that expertise into a real SaaS product, this is what a fast, confident path to production looks like.
Ready to productise your own expertise? Contact Sam Halcrow on 0431197004 or sam@halcrow.com.au.