New AI features let companies predict out-of-stocks and warehouse product shortages, accurately forecast consumer demand, and discover sales and supply chain insights in seconds
Alloy.ai, a software platform that helps consumer brands rapidly sense and adjust to changes in consumer demand and supply chain disruptions, today announced the launch of new predictive and generative AI features to help companies overcome the sales, inventory, forecasting and supply chain challenges they are facing due to an uncertain economy and unpredictable consumer demand.
With this new set of features, consumer goods brands can avoid out-of-stocks and OTIF (on-time in full) fines, grow incremental sales, forecast more accurately and achieve full visibility into their finished-goods supply chains. These powerful new analytics features use advanced simulations to predict potential sales and inventory problems, and then prescribe specific actions companies can take to avoid them.
The Alloy.ai application is powered by a data platform that automatically aggregates and harmonizes point-of-sale (POS) data from all of a company’s retail and ecommerce channels, and syncs it with inventory and internal supply chain data from a company’s ERP systems. This gives Alloy.ai’s customers – such as Bic, Crayola, Bosch, Melissa & Doug, SimpliSafe and others – instant visibility into demand and inventory across their own networks and those of their retailers. Because Alloy.ai automates the work of harmonizing and modeling disparate unstructured data sources, customers can ensure their data is AI-ready, making it easier than ever before to apply technologies such as predictive analytics and AI.
“Before Alloy.ai, we were flying blind, without visibility into inventory levels at our third-party distribution and retail partners’ networks”
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“Before Alloy.ai, we were flying blind, without visibility into inventory levels at our third-party distribution and retail partners’ networks,” said Kayla Harriss, supply chain manager at Valvoline Global Operations. “The Alloy.ai platform brings in and automatically cleans messy inventory data from numerous sources and combines it with data from our own ERP. Now, we can track inventory levels across our entire network to ensure we always have healthy weeks of supply, avoiding costly out-of-stocks with our retail partners and ensuring that consumers will always find our products when they need them.”
On top of Alloy.ai’s core capabilities — such as POS trend analysis, cross-retailer lost sales alerts and promotional impact experiments — Alloy.ai customers can now:
- Proactively identify warehouse stock risks (Video): Predict well in advance whether your warehouse inventory is at risk of low supply, so you can take corrective action. Advanced simulations in Alloy.ai help replenishment teams mitigate warehouse-stock outs with the goal of improving fill rates, shipping on-time, reducing OTIF fines and ultimately minimizing impact to downstream on-shelf availability.
- Make better allocation decisions when supply is constrained: Advanced simulations flag upcoming shortages, identify impacted orders and determine downstream supply positions, enabling an allocation strategy focused on minimizing POS impact.
- Identify opportunities for incremental sales with retail replenishment recommendations: Alloy.ai produces specific, actionable recommendations that show replenishment teams exactly how much additional inventory is needed to pre-empt retail stockouts with clear data-backed insights to persuade retail buyers.
- Get full supply chain inventory visibility: Monitor omnichannel inventory levels and trends across your own warehouses as well as your partners’ retail distribution centers, e-commerce fulfillment centers and stores to get a macro understanding of where product is building up and where it is being depleted.
- Alloy.ai point-of-sale forecasts: Alloy.ai’s short- and long-term demand sensing algorithms produce POS forecasts based on high-frequency, granular demand and channel inventory data as well as seasonality and historical trends, to power predictive and prescriptive analytics and demand planning.
- Get instant answers to supply chain and sales questions with the Alloy.ai assistant, powered by generative AI: Ask a question using normal language and get an answer from our AI assistant in seconds. No need to configure dashboards or dig through data — the AI assistant does the work for you.
“AI is on everyone’s mind today, and with good reason — the technology’s potential for the consumer goods industry is massive. We’re constantly approached by companies that are excited about AI, but aren’t sure how to begin applying it to their business,” said Joel Beal, co-founder and CEO of Alloy.ai. “With today’s launch we’re giving our customers the predictive and prescriptive AI features they’ve been seeking — features they can easily apply to their business today to drive millions in new revenue and reduce costly mistakes like out-of-stocks and OTIF fines.”
Alloy.ai users can also customize their own analysis by choosing from more than 350 consumer goods-specific metrics ready for cross-retailer analysis, including marketing promotion analysis, phantom inventory, new item execution, geographic analysis and more.
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