Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: UK sustainable household products brand Bower Collective is adopting Inventory Planner by Sage to facilitate smarter, slicker inventory planning. New KPMG alliance leverages Acquia’s open, flexible DXP to drive personalised customer experiences. DRUID partners with Unite to provide consumption-based conversational AI automation service. Amperity, the enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands has partnered with global brand giant Authentic Brands Group. Infor and Foresight Retail partnership aims to offer last-mile solution for fashion brands.
Bower Collective selects Inventory Planner by Sage
UK sustainable household products brand Bower Collective is adopting Inventory Planner by Sage to facilitate smarter, slicker inventory planning. It gives it access to data-driven sales forecasting, in-depth inventory data and robust, multi-levelled reporting. That will allow the team to know exactly what products to buy and when to buy them to reach growing customer demand.
Bower Collective is London-based and was launched in 2020. It is a home product brand focused on natural, effective products delivered in a reusable packaging system. The brand’s range of sustainable products in the household and personal care categories includes laundry detergent, dishwashing liquid, hand wash and body wash.
Customers at Bower Collective can buy product refills and reusable dispensers, as well as create custom orders to suit their individual needs. It means inventory for the brand heavily consists of custom bundles and kits. In opting for Inventory Planner, the brand will receive real-time inventory insights and integrated demand forecasting for all components of bundles and kits in its diverse product catalogue.
Inventory Planner’s full range of data-fuelled intelligence includes full inventory visibility, intuitive reporting, industry-leading sales forecasting capability and accurate and reliable purchasing recommendations.
With Inventory Planner supporting Bower Collective’s forecasting, purchasing and reporting processes, the eco-brand can track what’s popular. It can make more informed purchasing decisions for its finished products, kits and bundles on a granular level. Thus allowing the team to create a slick, optimized inventory that will maximize space in the warehouse, drive profitability and boost vital cash flow.
The upgrade means Bower Collective can ditch its spreadsheet-based inventory calculations. Instead, it receives integrated, accurate inventory insights across all products, channels and warehouse locations that are always up-to-date.
KPMG and Acquia Collaborate form partnership to support experience transformation
KPMG LLP and Acquia today announced a strategic alliance to deliver Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (Acquia DXP) to enterprise customers across industries. The platform supports marketing, content, and IT teams looking to create personalized, secure digital experiences at scale, and make them available on any digital platform.
Consumers today expect relevant, consistent experiences each time they interact with a brand. Content and communications must be personalized and presented in a cohesive manner across channels, including websites, mobile apps, intranets, social platforms, digital signage, e-commerce sites, and more. Acquia DXP supports this by enabling brands to create, manage, deliver, and optimize content-driven experiences for customers.
With the new alliance, the Customer Advisory team of KPMG LLP will provide services that tailor the capabilities of Acquia DXP to the requirements of clients. Foundational products within Acquia DXP include the open-source content management system Drupal and the Acquia Cloud Platform.
The latter is Acquia’s market-leading customer data platform. It delivers personalization for understanding customer behavior in real-time. It also contains the company’s award-winning digital asset management system. Acquia DXP enables marketers to use these products, individually or together, to create data-driven experiences that increase customer engagement.
DRUID partners with Unite to provide consumption-based conversational AI automation service
DRUID, a provider of conversational AI technology for enterprise productivity, has partnered with Unite, a leading Automation as a Service provider, to offer a unique consumption-based conversational AI service. This partnership allows enterprises to digitalize customer and employee interactions while integrating with other automation technologies seamlessly on a monthly fee basis.
Unite’s usage-based automation service provides organizations with fully managed automation services that include RPA, IDP, communication mining, AI, and ML, all from a single source. This eliminates the need for enterprises to invest in licenses and infrastructure, and centres of excellence, saving them both time and money.
With this partnership, enterprises can now access the first-ever consumption-based conversational AI service, allowing them to take advantage of Unite’s hyper-automation platform and DRUID’s conversational AI platform and seamlessly integrate with other automation technologies, which will enable rapid end-to-end digital transformation.
DRUID is a perfect fit for the Unite platform, providing Artificial Intelligence technology that allows users to interact with business systems and trigger automated processes through spoken or written natural language to complete business tasks.
This is possible by using advanced Machine Learning, NLU (Natural Language Understanding), NLP (Natural Language Processing), interactive voice recognition, powerful integrations, data processing, and automation. It allows seamless end-to-end automation for customer and employee contact centres, sales and marketing and one-stop digitalization for a vast number of business verticals such as insurance, banking, healthcare and retail.
The partnership is a milestone in the industry and a major step towards a more automated and efficient future.
Authentic Brands Group unifies customer data with Amperity
Amperity, the enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, has partnered with global brand giant Authentic Brands Group (Authentic). With a vast roster of more than 40 iconic and world-renowned brands, including Reebok, Forever 21, Ted Baker, Juicy Couture and David Beckham, Authentic’s digital platform is powered by more than 200M consumer data files.
In partnership with Amperity, Authentic will look to activate data from multiple online and offline touchpoints, including pre-purchase, point-of-sale, and post-purchase customer care, to create unified customer profiles. Amperity will become Authentic’s cornerstone partner for data management strategy, helping to unify in-store and digital experiences for consumers across its portfolio of brands.
Amperity solutions bring together Authentic’s diverse consumer data to enable a 360-degree unified view and comprehensive understanding of its brand consumers to enhance each brands’ digital engagement strategy.
Infor partners with Foresight Retail to improve merchandise and assortment planning
Infor, the industry cloud company has developed a partnership with Foresight Retail. Foresight Retail delivers merchandise and assortment planning to help fashion brands and retailers improve inventory management. This helps balance supply to demand, and thereby avoid stock outs, markdowns, obsolete inventory and potentially landfill.
A fashion brand needs to
- Set seasonal targets and budgets based on last season’s performance.
- Create an overall line plan to give guidance to product development of new collections.
- Plan estimated demand by sales channel, including initial allocation to stores.
- Propose a suitable buy plan to make sure supply aligns with demand.
- Monitor in-season progress to propose accurate replenishment of stores.
The pain point for fashion brands is that this process is often managed outside the ERP system, in Excel for example, making it prone to error and time consuming to manage. The major risk is that the overall planning mechanism is not accurate, leading to inventory excess or shortages.
Together, Infor and Foresight Retail can provide a more robust fashion offering, with support on merchandise and assortment planning that includes financial planning, range planning for different sales channels, forecasting, inventory allocation and replenishment. Foresight Retail’s modern solution offers preconfigured accelerators to cover standard planning needs and help speed deployment — with a possibility to fine tune as needed to suit unique needs.
