It’s a constant battle: brands ceaselessly seek avenues to optimize their operations, increase market share, and enhance customer satisfaction in order to stand out in a crowded marketplace. While securing increased orders and prime shelf space remain paramount goals, it's crucial for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) companies to ponder what they might be overlooking in this pursuit. Case in point—how to better leverage the transformative power of data.
Big data in retail, sourced from major players like Amazon, Target, Tesco, and Walmart, provides invaluable insights for analyzing and predicting customer behavior and market trends. This data encompasses customer information including behavioral, demographic, and spending patterns, alongside product and inventory data. This also includes sales data to provide guidance on market direction, store and online performance, and distribution center patterns. These rich streams of data help companies create insights across an integrated ecosystem to ensure the right product is available at the right place and time.
Advanced supply chain planning software serves as the gateway to unlocking deeper knowledge of customers and channels. Implementing an integrated view and automated analysis of multiple consumer and retail analytics offers a true competitive advantage to optimize logistics, predict demand, and efficiently manage inventory. The power of this data equips companies with a lever to transform their traditional supply chain planning approaches, providing them with the agility and foresight needed to effectively navigate the ever-evolving consumer landscape.
By leveraging insights gleaned from individual retailers, organizations can make informed decisions across various facets of their operations from product development to manufacturing, marketing, sales and promotions.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits CPG companies can expect to quickly gain from a stronger integration of retail data into supply chain planning strategies.
Forecast and Plan with Confidence
Understanding current business dynamics is crucial for effective supply chain planning. Access to detailed data across retailers provides companies with the foundation to align teams and forecast with confidence. By analyzing sales patterns across various retailers, businesses can gain insights into top-level demand. With clean and optimized data at their fingertips, planners can accurately forecast and strategically allocate resources to meet evolving market demands.
Centralize Data for Supply Chain Orchestration
In today's interconnected and accelerated landscape, cross-functional collaboration is essential for success. A seamless flow of retail data within the supply chain planning environment facilitates effective communication and collaboration across departments. With a single source of truth for data, each business unit – from sales to finance to operations – can access the information they need, when they need it. Planners can automatically aggregate data from multiple retailers and distributors into existing systems, harmonizing data across sources and streamlining supply chain orchestration for optimal performance.
Optimize Inventory Management and Minimize Stockouts
One of the most critical challenges for CPGs is maintaining optimal inventory levels while ensuring high levels of customer service. For example, retail-level data and insights empower teams to keep a vigilant eye on every store and distribution center, ensuring shelves remain stocked and products continue to sell regardless of channel. The ability to track inventory and shipments gives businesses an edge to detect out-of-stocks across thousands of stores, enabling proactive measures to anticipate demand and refill orders promptly. This level of visibility into demand patterns at the retail level enables organizations to optimize inventory levels, reduce stockouts, and minimize excess inventory holding costs.
Drive Profitability Through Informed Decision-Making
Utilizing multiple sources of data serves as a goldmine of insights for driving profitability and growth. With a granular view of performance across locations, brands can identify opportunities to drive sales by shaping demand. Companies can leverage data to identify trends, evaluate sales from merchandising strategies and promotions, and flag stores and channels at risk to reassess distribution. Analyzing sales performance and consumer behavior across different product categories enables companies to optimize assortments and strategies to maximize profits.
The Power of Integration: Retail Data and Supply Chain Planning Software
The true power of retail data lies in its ability to provide actionable insights when integrated with an advanced supply chain planning software solution. By aggregating this data with contextual information such as environmental factors, socio-economic trends, and regional demographics, companies can gain a holistic understanding of market dynamics and anticipate future demand fluctuations with greater accuracy.
The Atlas Planning Platform from John Galt Solutions offers companies a unique competitive advantage through the access of comprehensive retail insights and data. Seamlessly integrating data from multiple retailers, Atlas empowers supply chain teams to make intelligent, data-driven decisions across the entire planning spectrum. Whether it's analyzing sales performance, monitoring inventory levels, or predicting future demand, Atlas provides users with real-time visibility and actionable insights.
Notable examples of retail-specific data accessible through Atlas includes leading retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Sam’s Club, Walgreens, The Home Depot, Tesco, Target, and much more. Advanced retailers’ data solutions are designed to offer suppliers unparalleled visibility into sales, inventory, and customer behavior across various channels. For instance, the recently launched Walmart Luminate provides suppliers with a shared view of buyer behavior, research-based customer insights, and trends across online, in-store, and mobile performance.
With these powerful insights at your fingertips in the Atlas Planning Platform, your team can seamlessly integrate retail demand insights into the decision-making process, optimize your supply chain, and foster mutual growth with retailers and major players in the industry.
Get in touch and we’ll show you how organizations like yours are leveraging retail data to stay ahead of the curve, driving strategic outcomes in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
