Consumer Goods Solutions

Accurate forecasts based on trustworthy data. Inventory that’s balanced with demand in near-real time. And perfectly aligned operational supply plans. Our consumer goods solutions include capabilities for:

• New product forecasting. Get a better sense of the risks and uncertainties in new product forecasts through the visualization of past new product introductions.
  
• Demand signal analytics. Understand buying trends and changes in demand by analyzing current market data from internal and external sources – including social media and POS.
  
• Inventory planning and optimization. Generate accurate forecasts at every level, down to individual SKUs. And shape supply to match fluctuating customer needs, marketplace dynamics and internal requirements.
  

Sense market signals that predict demand and help you shape it. Unify data from across your organization and beyond. And create an optimized supply plan to reduce inventory costs. Only SAS enables you to:

• Avoid under- or over-stocking with near-real-time insight into supply and demand dynamics. Calculate optimal inventory policies using multiechelon optimization with state-of-the-art simulation. And use predictive modeling and what-if analysis to find out how different variables will affect the supply/demand balance.
• Improve planning outcomes by generating unbiased consensus forecasts that work in conjunction with the S&OP process. Use time-series forecasting to build models that consider intermittent demand, new product launches and retired products. And optimization algorithms show you the best action to take based on forecasted demand.
• Share customer and supply chain intelligence among sales, marketing, finance, operations, supply teams and third-party stakeholders in support of the S&OP process. An interactive dashboard lets you monitor, track and report on forecast performance metrics. And a forecasting planner workbench generates automated, statistically driven consensus forecasts.

More effective, streamlined marketing processes. Superior product quality, and an outstanding brand image. And a deeper understanding of your customers that leads to increased customer profitability. We deliver proven consumer goods solutions that include capabilities for:

• Customer data management. Access all the right data – from across the entire customer life cycle – where and when you need it.
• Customer link analytics. Identify and target top social network influencers and their communities.
  
• Marketing mix management. Get the best possible marketing results by optimizing your mix of advertising and promotions across all channels.
  
• Customer segmentation. Know which customers are most likely to purchase your products and services – and why.
• Real-time analytics. Make the best offers to the right customers at the right time – in real time.
  
  

Create complete customer profiles that you can use to develop more targeted and relevant campaigns. Turn customers into brand evangelists. Use your sales and marketing resources more efficiently. With SAS, you can:

• Know what customers think of your products and services – and why. Reveal customers’ buying patterns, significant life changes and other factors that play into purchase decisions and sentiment.
  
• Choose the best demand-shaping actions. Test multiple scenarios and conduct what-if analyses to determine how changes in your marketing strategies or product mix will affect demand and profitability.
  
• Create interactive offers and highly targeted campaigns that really hit the mark. Segment customers based on cross-channel behavior. And use sophisticated optimization algorithms and next-best action models to identify the best times and channels for communicating – and the best offer to present at the perfect moment.
  

More accurate demand forecasts – even for new products. A better understanding of SKU and assortment, at the individual store level. And improved salesforce performance. Our consumer products solutions enable:

• Store clustering. Create store segments based on actual sales history, and focus assortment planning activities on the most significant store groups.
  
• Demand forecasting. Use POS data to understand SKU and assortment, pricing sensitivity and other factors that affect demand.
• Data visualization. Visually explore your data to spot relevant correlations and to better understand the impact of business drivers.
• Data management. Access, transform and cleanse large volumes of sales and marketing data from virtually any source and analyze it to identify trends and aid key business decisions.

Gain meaningful insight into sales performance – all the way down to an individual customer’s basket. And create more profitable sales plans. With SAS you can:

• Drive profitability. Conduct what-if analyses to find out how changes to your product or marketing mix will affect revenue and margin.
  
• Determine optimal demand-shaping actions. Test different pricing and promotional scenarios quickly and easily, without requiring IT support.
• Uncover hidden opportunities. Use interactive data visualizations to spot patterns and relationships that would otherwise be missed.

Exceptional customer service and a positive brand image. More control over service costs. And a smarter approach to tackling service issues. Our consumer goods solutions help you manage:

• Brand equity. Know what customers think of your brand, and protect your brand’s reputation.
• Perceptual service quality. Understand and manage the perceived quality of your products.
  
• Early issue warning. Continuously monitor multiple parameters and receive automated alerts about potential issues before they become bigger problems.
  
• Issue resolution analysis. Conduct efficient root-cause analyses using powerful filtering capabilities, so you can find and fix issues quickly.
• Resource planning. Make accurate predictions of service volumes so you have the right resources on hand. And give managers and agents continuous feedback to improve the service experience.

Focus on customer satisfaction to nurture a positive brand image. Create and grow service revenue streams. And manage the cost to serve. With SAS, you can:

• Monitor customer opinions expressed in social media and other venues, and use sentiment analysis to add context to conversations. Combine structured and unstructured data.
• Quickly spot potential glitches, identify emerging issues and determine root causes by using embedded, predictive analytics to find and fix problems fast.
  
• Manage and optimize your service operations by feeding information on problems and root causes into your sales, parts and resource forecasting systems to ensure that you have the right parts, call center agents and service technicians on hand when they are needed.
  

Data silos eliminated across manufacturing and supply chain operations. Trustworthy, up-to-date data to guide every decision. Confident, immediate responses based on precise, real-time information. Our consumer products solutions provide a single platform that lets you control, improve and analyze your data with capabilities for:

• Master data management. Get a common, consistent – and trusted – view of data across all your applications, systems, plants and locations.
  
• Data quality. Ensure clean, reliable data.
• Data governance. Develop a consistent set of policies and processes for all your information.
• Event stream processing. Derive immediate analytic insights from the real-time data streaming into your operations.
  

Collect, unite and access exactly the right data at the right time – no matter the size, source or format. Eliminate errors and inconsistencies. And use event stream processing to make important decisions in real time. With SAS, you can:

• Get the right data every time. Extract, load and transform data at high speeds using batch processes, message queues and real-time processes. And match information within or across sources, standardizing formatting differences as you go.
• Ensure top-quality data. Establish data hierarchies, reference data definitions and validate against standard or customized rules. Manage entity resolution routines through advanced fuzzy-matching technology. And create multirecord clusters, confidence scores and scatter plots to determine potential clusters.
  
• Base decisions on real-time data. Capture and share data in real time by continuously analyzing it as it’s received (e.g., from social data streams). Evaluate real-time production and operational data to monitor process efficiency and uptime. And personalize offers based on website search criteria.