Global FMCG
Global consumer goods company chooses Aera Decision Cloud™ to improve people effectiveness through Decision Intelligence
Established over 100 years ago, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies known for its great brands, global footprint, and its belief in doing business the right way is driven to make sustainable living commonplace. Its products — beauty and personal care, foods and refreshment, and home care — are available in around 190 countries used by 3.4 billion people every day with a turnover of over US$56 billion in 2021.
Business Need
To ensure its immense production power would be a competitive advantage and to reduce the impact of the acceleration of consumer segmentation, hyper-personalization, and anytime demands of customers on its business.
Results
- Continuous demand evaluations with recommended changes
- Over 10 machine learning models with an automated most accurate selection
- Automated writeback of demand changes to internal systems
- Complete accessibility to recommendation reasoning to all planners
The Challenges
With billions of dollars of revenue in the fast-moving consumer goods category, the company identified its challenges — the acceleration of consumer segmentation, hyper-personalization, and anytime demands of customers — impacting its business in an unprecedented way.
It wanted to use its immense production power as a competitive advantage and aimed to leapfrog beyond incremental improvement approaches centered around ERPs, planning systems, and other legacy transactional systems.
The Solution
Aera Decision Cloud — Aera Demand Skills
Aera Crawlers — SAP ERP, SAP APO, and flat file
The internal innovative leadership team worked with Aera leveraging Decision Intelligence — Aera’s patented crawlers and cognitive processing technologies which break data out of silos and accelerate that information into decisions — to enable continuous planning and agile response by creating time for planners to collaborate and innovate.
The company is now processing millions of records and gigabytes of data from ERP, planning, and transactional systems to enable real-time assessment of information, machine learning to make future predictions, and modeling decision outcomes to make touchless recommendations every day.
“We moved from our monthly planning cycle to a weekly S&OP cycle, which is far more nimble, far more agile and we could reduce 50% of the time spent in the planning.”
-Global VP of Planning, Analytics, and Customer Experience
Results
Implementing Aera’s Decision Intelligence, planners estimated a reduction of time looking for information from 60-70% of their day to less than 20% of their day. Further, the planners were able to spend more time with each other looking for new solutions, maximized by simultaneously introducing agile methodologies with the project.
This deployment saw higher user adoption rates compared to other digital transformation projects because users could see all the data and logic that went into a recommendation, with Aera functioning as a glass box — understandable and transparent.