Large Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Retail organizations tend to be highly distributed; central, regional and local warehouses are usually located in different geographies and are separated from corporate and administrative offices where back office functions are carried out. This leads to delays in planning, production, sales, distribution and lack of visibility of various processes in the value chain.
Industry challenges
Delays in product development:
Brand managers are flooded with information on products, promotions and sales but seldom have resources to focus on forecasting, compliance and regulations. This often results in delays in product development and potential sales, particularly for high margin and high movement items.
Delays in introducing new line of category / brand / item:
As multiple business units like category, warehouse, and logistics are involved, the time taken to introduce new line of category / brand / item is tedious, and lowers the sales potential.
Difficulty in predicting product performance:
If the work environments between CPG and retailers or channel partners are isolated, access to data that can help evaluate and predict product performance becomes difficult. Analysis becomes incomplete and inaccurate for products that need to be promoted.
Challenges to ensure continuous stock replenishment:
One of the most important challenges for any retail organization is to ensure continuous replenishment of existing goods and to launch new line of categories / brands / products pertinent to customer demographics.
Mindtree’s Collaborative Process Platform (CPP) for CPG-Retail Enterprises through Pega’s Case Management capabilities
Mindtree’s Collaborative Process Platform for CPG - Retail is a transformational solution platform developed leveraging Pega (a pure play BPM platform) to automate business processes between CPG and Retail. The solution has a wide range of pre-built process templates for various processes such as:
- New item introduction and maintenance
- Omni-channel sales order processing
- Campaign management workflow
- Promotion Management
- Purchase order Management
CPG-Retail Collaboration Framework-Functional Coverage
The solution provides a reliable and a seamless platform by optimizing interactions between CPG and retailers for quick BPM adoption with minimal effort, while ensuring quality of data.
CPG-Retail Collaboration Pega Framework addresses the following challenges:
CPP provides retailers a creative and comprehensive way to execute merchandising and omni-channel sales at an enterprise level. It provides an integrated process framework for modeling, design and measurement of business performance by uniquely encompassing the planning, governance and execution requirements for various aspects of a business. CPP comes with a pre-packaged set of process templates (Business process definitions) and several other related assets for enabling quick adoption of BPM and ultimately achieving product, quality and customer excellence.
The collaboration solution enables several key participants including brand managers, category managers, store managers and account managers of both organizations to quickly introduce items into the retailer system in a structured and controlled mechanism. It reduces multiple data reference points in retailer and CPG back end systems, thereby enabling better control of product attributes like item details, price, packaging guidelines, compliance details and quality.
Additionally, CPG firms and retailers can work on a mix of push and pull methodologies (real-time inventory and sales detail can be seen by any stakeholder) to ensure optimized inventory level at stores as the solution can provide visibility and alerts for faster processing of purchase orders. Optimized inventory, correct cost price and selling price during catalog sale or promotion drives higher sales and better margins, resulting in a win-win situation for both retailers as well as CPG companies.
The solution streamlines omni-channel sales offerings by enabling interactions through multiple channels and ensures timely delivery to customers.
Mindtree CPG-Retail Collaboration Solution Accelerator
Solution Offerings
Key solution highlights of CPP:
- Flexible, dynamic, configurable workflow to meet business needs
- SLA-based workflow automation
- Single source of data entry to reduce redundant data inputs
- Secure data storage and selective role-based access for high security
- Dispute minimization with timely and unalterable data capture
- Bulk storage of item information and documentation
- Linkages of all modules to provide end-to-end visibility and tracking
- Business audit trail feature to track complete history and changes for a particular campaign or user
- User-defined business rules to trigger validation and business logic
- Controlled analysis of data
