It helps in increasing top line revenue and saving costs at the same time by:

  • Determining the ROI for your marketing strategy.
  • Ensuring you spend the right amount at the right place at the right time.
  • Identifying lost opportunities.
  • Identifying new segments to target.
  • Optimizing spend, based on the BCG Matrix.
  • Providing insights on determining the best promotional strategies which yield maximum results.
  • Bettering your marketing and sales strategies.
  • Increasing sales by improving operational efficiencies by driving better OTIF and MSL compliance.
  • Identifying the ROI on the shelf expenditure for each individual retailer.
  • Improved sales forecasting.
  • Understanding your market share and competitor performances better.
  • Helping you analyze the performance of new product launches relative to other compete products.

Part of the BI strategy involves improving operational efficiencies. This is done primarily across field sales teams and supply chain teams by measuring the following parameters.

Must Stock List: Based on the marketing campaigns and the forecasted sales, it is crucial to keep your stockpiles updated, as end-consumers, at the retail point, might choose your competitor’s product due to non-availability.

One critical aspect to increase sales is product availability at the outlets and making sure that these outlets have the required stock and are displaying your products. Based on the promotions being run and previous sales, field sales teams would try to ensure that the products that are being promoted or are in high-demand, based on sales history, are present at all the retail outlets. Effectively, these teams make sure that no opportunity is lost for the company. Ensuring this increases secondary sales and helps in creating an upstream demand and increasing the primary sales of the company.

On Time in Full: ‘Every order received needs to be serviced on time and in full (OTIF),’ is common knowledge across FMCG companies and distributors. Companies try to master it but due to various bottlenecks, such as stock not being available at the warehouses, trucks not being available, truck loading efficiency, etc. orders cannot be fulfilled in time and in full.

This also creates differences of opinion with the retailers for non-availability of products – impacting secondary sales and forcing them to look for alternatives to service end-consumers. This directly affects the primary sales and also benefits your competitors.

Artificial intelligence helps in improving OTIF loss by looking at the regions, products or reasons causing these inefficiencies. The sales and supply chain teams can work to fix these inefficiencies so that none of these opportunities are lost and increasing the primary sales revenues. With BI, you can forecast OTIF losses based on the sales forecast, actual secondary sales, and production capabilities. You can determine how to avoid these losses either by increasing production, decreasing marketing budget or improving your supply chain.

An ideal business intelligence system should include

  • A ready to deploy data model
  • Dashboards
  • Chatbots for sales, supply chain, and marketing teams

Having these will help teams across your organization access critical information with ease. Information would be available at their fingertips – therefore more time can be spent in strategizing ways to improve your company’s top line. A self-service BI helps teams take decisions based on the insights without having to depend of developers or MIS teams. BI systems can even send out alerts if KPIs go above and beyond a threshold. Dashboards in the BI system helps keep track of all the stockpiles for various retailers and distributors.

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