Effective Assortment Planning using AI to Forecast Consumer Demands
ThinkCol leverages realtime data to deliver constructive insights for multiple stakeholders
An international beverage company is actively rolling out vending machines with IOT capabilities to leverage data in real-time and ThinkCol builds data visualizations to display performance of different products in various machines.
Inventory statuses of the machines are reported in near real-time, which allows the inventory team to decide which machines to prioritize for replenishment. Out-of-stock (OOS) durations and consumption rates of the products are calculated from historical machine signals for each machine such that the sales team can optimize the assortment to reduce OOS situations and maximize sales opportunity.
Besides sales-related metrics, heartbeat signals and system exceptions are monitored to alert the maintenance team that certain machines need to be attended to.
Insights such as inventory behaviours, which were not available before and are now visualized in a meaningful context, allow the company to effectively allocate their internal resources such as how to best determine a driver’s route for refilling the machines subject to factors including holidays, historical sales data, promotional information, and pricing. This opens up new doors to the future of dynamic routing and warehouse management for the company.
