Sustainability
sustainability within Retail and CPG enterprises worldwide. Analysing how consumers behave can help enterprises reduce wastage, plan and forecast ahead of time, identify problem areas and staff appropriately - all of which leads to more efficient stores, with less waste, and therefore better customer experiences.
What are the inherent complications involved when integrating sustainability into retail and CPG practices and how can they be overcome? Lots of quickly moving parts can make it difficult to see where goals align (e.g. profitable sustainability), and where they conflict, so trade offs oſten have to be made. A specific challenge is that all of these decisions are currently made in silos because it can prove simply too hard for humans to connect all the dots themselves, especially at the speed required, which can prevent end-to-end and overall business objective efficiency. Advanced Analytics and automation are the only realistic
solutions. Retailers and CPG’s need enterprise-wide data platforms that combine and make available granular data to support real-time analytics as table stakes. Only then are you in a position to have the flexibility and agility to constantly adapt to changes in external factors, customer behaviour and other elements such as supply chain disruptions. You can no longer afford to create plans based on incomplete data, information that isn’t 100% up to date, or insights that don’t factor in the impact on other parts of the business.
Can you explain more about how consumer behaviour and drivers can be used to forecast and align the trends and journey towards more sustainable products? Tere are a range of underlying changes to shoppers’ habits and expectations, including those looking for more sustainable offerings. Te massive swing towards online sales, that was necessitated by lockdowns, is now correcting somewhat, though the “Amazon effect”
is still very much at play, with consumers wanting their products faster than ever, driving pre-staging of inventory, which is wasteful both in terms of holding it and in disposal when the next best thing comes out. However, we need to be very careful because ‘instant gratification’
is a key customer satisfier so we need to enable this so we can compete, try to minimise the environmental impact through better analytics and slowly try to wean people off the instantaneous drug, and perhaps offering something like a ‘get it right now’ or ‘get it greener’ delivery options. For Chief Commercial Officers (CCO’s) these seesaw changes
make getting the right product ranges in the right stores at the right prices even more challenging. Tey all know that data is the answer; but getting the correct data, from every department across the business, to the people who need it in time to make confident decisions is challenging. Tose that can though, will differentiate with product, pricing and customer service advantages, and thrive and benefit from the resurgence from lockdowns, whilst also doing their bit for the planet by being able to respond to sustainable preferences. Comparisons with performance of the last two years are now much
harder to interpret, so CCO’s need now much better real-time data on actual performance and trends. Tey also need it at the most granular of levels – down to every individual store, product and customer. Data has always been vital to this role – but now the type of data and the way it needs to be handled requires transformation. Spreadsheets of historic performance and aggregated figures across stores or formats simply cannot provide the insights needed. Human- centric assessment can no longer handle the speed, volume or complexity of the analysis needed to understand performance minute by minute, product by product, store by store and customer by customer and it is only when data and analytics are fully and properly implemented that success can be found.
24 | May 2022
www.pcr-online.biz
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