India is in the thick of combating the global pandemic and is currently subject to temporary lockdown due to the spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19). There has been disruption in food supplies, shortage of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and essential commodities, and a sudden increase in demand for certain medical, healthcare and daily essential retail products in the country as well as across the globe.
The demand for daily staples has precipitously increased due to disruption in logistics, uncertainty in supply-chain across state borders and panic buying.[[ Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies including Hindustan Unilever, Parle, Amul and Godrej said production has been hiked to ensure there are no shortages amid panic buying. Hindustan Unilever has slashed prices of hygiene products.
According to ITC, it is “extremely critical” to ensure adoption of precautionary measures during this period, but it is also important, that during such challenging times, “essential products are made available to consumers in a safe and sustainable manner across the length and breadth of the country through continuity of supply”.]] (Source : EconomicTimes.com)

It has become extremely challenging for the organisations not only to meet the demand supply ratio but also ensure the availability of the raw material and supplies for the production. Geographical reach also becomes crucial.
Though the retail giants will have to ensure the above aspects during such critical situations, they would also have to make sure (identify an opportunity) that they can also tap an untapped market / geography with more or less customer driven marketing strategies.
This can be an opportunity for essential foods/ retails / dairy / healthcare products based companies, as today a common man seeks to buy the above irrespective of the brand name. The local players or the players who haven’t yet capitalised on some of the local markets have an opportunity to expand their footprint. Ensuring that an apt quality is maintained, the lockdown time might just be enough to make the consumers realise the essence of the products and might convert the customer base towards them.

On the other hand, meeting the demands of a huge population of a country like India is itself a challenging task. Organisations needs to ensure that the production lines are working intact, availability of raw materials is ample and that the delivery of the produced goods is to be done on time. This in turn involves a lot of strategic and analytical approach for making crucial decisions.

How Data Science and Analytics plays a Vital Role?

FMCG and essential retail sector can benefit through data science & advanced analytics in the following ways:

Inventory Optimisation

Align inventory planning, forecasting and execution capabilities across the organisation. Obtain insights from vast volumes of data at the SKU location on a daily / weekly / monthly basis to improve inventory forecasting.

Production Forecasting Optimization

The focus is on the evaluation of promotion forecasting based on a measurement framework of forecasting accuracy/error, bias and stability. Improving forecasting accuracy can potentially lead to reductions in excess inventory, lower labour costs, lower expedite costs, holding costs, spoilage discounts and reduced stock-outs.

Production Planning

The focus is on the support of delivering more scientific and data based real time contingency plans by generating optimal solutions in short time windows after certain disruptions happen.

Asset Analytics

The focus is on the prediction of the lifetime of long term assets such as building, large machinery and other structural elements. This is done by calculating the influence of for instance weather, material and usage of the assets.

Quality Analytics

The focus is on identifying the high impact issues and understanding a facility’s past performance through data. The solution consolidates information allowing a better understanding of the organization’s scope drilling down to a single facility to make data driven actionable decisions.

Workforce Safety

Indicates the identification of the key factors impacting safety related incidents, the design of measurable interventions to minimize safety risk and the prediction of types of person(s) who are most at risk.

Resource & Route Optimization

The goal of the model is to optimize the available resources and truck routes. This is executed to maximize profitability by implementing the new optimized route planning model which leads to a reduction of the resource usage.

Supply Chain Diagnostics

Supply chain diagnostics aims at enabling and improving the ability to view every item (Shipment, Order, SKU, etc.) at any point and at all times in the supply chain. Furthermore its goal is to alert on process exceptions, to provide analytics, and to analyse detailed supply chain data to determine opportunities of cycle time reduction.

Market Basket Analysis

Helps to analyse Cross-selling – Up-selling of new products to the right set of customers. Improve sales by identifying sets of product sold together and reorganize the store layout to keep such products close to each other. Improve the efficiency of promotions by promoting one set of products and have increases sales for the non-promoted products
…and much MORE!

How can Alpha Analytics Serve You?
Alpha Analytics have an expertise in building analytical and data science based solutions for various industry segments enabling the business users to take data driven decisions and delivering actionable insights.
With a wide range of technology expertise and flexible engagement models we always deliver quality projects and solutions to our customer base.
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