Tyler has worked as a sales rep for a beverage distributor since 2015. His typical workday starts at five in the morning with the app on his tablet laying out a route of the stores he’s supposed to visit for the day. In a store, he takes the stock inventory, does product placement, discusses stocking needs with the store manager, and places the order through the sales app. He repeats this entire process for multiple stores across the city each day.
The sales app is the frontend of a legacy route accounting system- the backbone of the supply chain, selling, and distribution functions across retailers worldwide. Tyler tries to close his day by early afternoon, but more often than not it stretches longer depending on the route, time is taken for ordering, and various other factors. The holidays can also be a challenge sometimes as the beverage company relies on Tyler’s experience and understanding of the demand of the stores tagged to him for orders.
For decades, ERP solutions have helped retailers manage every aspect of their business. With time, as the business environment grew more complex, traditional ERP solutions fell short of meeting ever-growing business demands like improving scalability, reducing manual interventions, employing advanced automation, ease of operations handling, intelligent analytics, and predicting product demand.
Today, there are solutions on the horizon that have the potential to reduce or eliminate manual dependency for tasks like ordering and inventory counting, giving sales reps like Tyler more time to focus on core in-store selling activities. The digital disruption has led retail and CPG leaders to look away from traditional ERP solutions and adopt AI-powered systems that leverage ERP data records to optimize stock levels, increase efficiency, predict demand, and elevate customer experiences.
Artificial Intelligence is a game-changer for retailers. Pairing traditional ERP systems with AI-enabled demand forecasting solutions helps you identify the next best actions based on past business data. Harnessing the power of AI on top of an existing ERP solution helps business leaders to make a shift from traditional methodologies to take the pressure of handling redundant activities off their shoulders and utilize the employees’ time more productively to focus on executing tasks that support innovation and growth.
The fast-changing advances in technology have enabled retailers with new ways to innovate, win customers’ trust, and promote loyalty. Quantiphi is one of the first AI-driven organizations to empower the retail and CPG industry to do just that with OrderSmart™.
OrderSmart™ by Quantiphi is a predictive ordering solution that uses proprietary AI/ML algorithms to transform the manual sales-order generation process, allowing retailers to save millions of dollars in OpEx savings and trim unnecessary spending. With OrderSmart™ bringing instant accessibility to intelligent orders, retailers like you can:
- Significantly reduce your operational expenses and improve profitability
- Save time and the number of visits needed for generating orders
- Accurately generate future orders in advance
- Reduce contractual labor dependency
- Leverage historical data from your existing ERP solutions like Encompass, eoStar, and SAP
OrderSmart™ in Action: Recently, Quantiphi partnered with CONA Services (Coke One North America) to leverage OrderSmart™ for seamlessly automating sales order generation. The solution helped CONA generate accurate draft sales orders for over 150,000+ convenience stores across North America. It led to a significant reduction in labor dependency along with OPEX Savings of approximately $10M. The solution further helped Coke Bottlers to manage its contract labors better with the help of future order generation capability.
To learn more about how Quantiphi can help retailers like you leverage a healthy blend of advanced analytics, cutting-edge AI, and machine learning techniques to ensure more efficient inventory allocation, improved operations, and an enhanced, personalized shopping experience, visit https://quantiphi.com/ or reach out to our experts.
