Enabling Real-time Demand Sensing with a Live Enterprise

As organizations increasingly turn to data to respond to changing market and customer demands, a new breed of enterprises is emerging -- the Live Enterprise. One that can sense and process information from the past and in real-time, efficiently, and intelligently. Data offers enterprises the power not just to transform themselves but also to transform the industries and markets they operate in. In short, it gives enterprises the potential to create memorable customer experiences, mitigate and manage risk, improve efficiencies, and identify new growth opportunities.

COVID-19 highlighted precisely this -- the opportunity that data offers and the gap between the potential and reality. While the last few weeks have underscored the absolute necessity of being able to respond on time and effectively, it has also highlighted an inability to do so. As consumers stock up on essentials and steer clear of the non-essentials, most retail and CPG companies have proved to be inadequately prepared. They have struggled with supply and demand management challenges such as acquiring POS data, cleansing, harmonizing varied data received from multiple retailers, and finally processing it centrally to derive insights to forecast demand accurately.

We have seen supply chains grappling to meet the pressure and vagaries of demand. But what if retailers and CPG companies could sense the change in demand, accurately, and in real-time?

It is possible! And, we have been helping clients do this. Traditionally, demand forecasting is made in advance using shipment information. This works well in the long-term, but in a crisis, when demand surges suddenly, updated real-time data is required to forecast short-term demand. Our answer, the Infosys Real-time Demand Sensing solution, uses a wide-range of sales data to improve near-future demand forecasts and enable the enterprise take on-time actions. It leverages data, on-cloud or on-premise, from varied sources like POS data, warehouse or distribution center inventory, and unmet orders to provide real-time insights and short-time bucket forecasts. The solution enables the enterprise to use daily POS data to analyze vital demand signals and make necessary adjustments to manage the supply chain effectively and deliver insights on shifts in demand across channels, categories, and brands.

Case-in-point: we were able to help our client navigate the demand, especially in New York state, one of the areas hardest hit areas by COVID-19. Our client, a CPG enterprise, was able to leverage all the demand signals associated with sales for the specific brand, consumption, price, and socio-economic factors, and use the information to run ‘what-if’ scenarios to shape future demand. By taking into consideration historical shipments and consumption trends (leveraging PoS data), we enabled the company to factor in the massive spike in demand that resulted from the panic buying of essentials. We analyzed data from sales, supply chain inventory, out of stock, and store inventory to provide real-time insights, enabling required course correction to minimize out of stock and optimize the supply chain. Furthermore, we helped perform near real-time demand sensing and inventory prioritization for their online channel using ePOS data.

Our three-tiered approach on the online channel using Data Acquisition & Harmonization, Predictive Analytics, and Insights & Strategy helped the CPG giant sort the On-Shelf Availability, Lost Buy Box Analysis, and Forecasting conundrum.

Three other significant benefits stood out:

Enabled quicker decisions: backed by insights, decisions could be made in hours instead of days or weeks.

Better accuracy of the forecast: the accuracy of the forecast went up to almost 85%, leveraging POS, competition, promotions, and weather data, and COVID-19 projections by geographical locations for seasonal planning and forecast corrections

Increased sales: by 2%, leveraging harmonized data in downstream systems to dispatch and prevent stock-out and adjust the delivery date for firm order customers within allowed SLAs.

There is no doubt that COVID-19 is a watershed moment for humanity, one that tested our collective will and faith. But I think we will also remember how we, finally, put the might of technology to real purpose – transforming companies, especially incumbents into Live Enterprises. More importantly, it allowed us to enable people to stay at home, minimize contact, and thereby save lives.