Over the past few years, Consumer Products companies have focused and based their business strategies on the Sell-In information. Due to different industry constraints (consumer spending contraction, private label growth, raw material price fluctuation, global and aggressive competition…) manufacturers need to act quickly in order to refine and improve their business models. Nowadays, one of the main competitive advantages is data analysis and prediction. In this area there are various interesting data sources that can be explored in different ways, but in my opinion, the Sell Out is a key to enhance sales performance in both On-Trade and Off-Trade channels.

Traditionally, there have been a couple of barriers in integrating and analyzing these data:

1. Retailers and distributors have been reticent to share sales with their suppliers until they have proven win-win collaborative strategies that report outstanding results.
2. The sell-out integration is complex and time-consuming: customer data comes in different formats and sources, KPIs, products and points of sale codification, levels of detail and sending frequency. Additionally, there is a constant variation in customer data content and format.

Manufacturers and retailers are now open to share more information and are finding themselves in the need of powerful solutions to make the integration simple and automatic. SDG has created Eagle: a standard, modular and customizable solution, that allows our customers to blend the sell-out information with other data sources in an easier way to achieve:

1. Sales Visibility: daily sales by point of sales and product, market share by store, automatic detection of sales and point of sales execution incidences…
2. Sales Growth: negotiation improvement with customers, potential points of sale identification, sales force incentives based on sell out, distributors sales force gamification…
3. Product Availability: sales and out of stock prediction using sell out and other variables, automatic order request generation for the stores, optimal assortment tracking…
4. Innovation: new market trends detection, daily tracking of distribution, rotation and consumer feedback for launches…
5. Promotional Efficiency & Profitability: ROI by promotion post-mortem analysis, ROI by promotion simulation, definition of segmented promotions by geographies or store clusters…

There is still a long road ahead in order to achieve complete visibility of each point of sale, the retailer-manufacturer collaboration has yet to mature, especially in some countries. Once achieved, the next challenge will be to have an overall vision of each consumer (shopping behaviors, preferences, consumption rates, allergies…) to offer a personalized, individual experience. We are expectant to see how long it will take the industry to reach this goal.