Manage inventory movement seamlessly in near real-time

Most of the food safety regulations are extremely stringent and require organizations to trace and hold products across the entire network within a few hours of a potential quality incident.

A typical ERP will be able to provide the Market Traceability with Integrated Hold and Release mechanism. For an enterprise that has been acquiring and consolidating companies, there are multiple legacy & non-legacy systems that could delay the trace and hold product when required. The complexity and cost aggravate when the internal systems (ERPs) need to connect and retrieve information from third-party managed sources like warehouses and distributors, customers across the network.

The need of the hour is an ERP agnostic, scalable, flexible, next-gen solution, that can seamlessly collaborate with the multiple legacy and non-legacy systems of information, to collect the data from factories and co-packer locations. The core focus should be to reuse as much as possible, the existing solution components, to achieve its regulatory requirements and to build the product traceability feature.

Transform financial & accounting (F&A) process with RPA & AI

Financial & Accounting (F&A) function is drastically changing, with its representatives increasingly driving more informed strategic decisions across business disciplines. They also play a crucial role in leveraging supplier relationships by adhering to their payment periods, thus enabling business growth by providing appropriate financial data and insights. CPG & Retail enterprises must have an agile F&A processing set-up to ensure the traceability of critical documents such as invoices, tax, and claim documents.

This is possible as a result of digital transformation taking place in F&A. However, financial legacy systems, paper-based documents, unstructured formats of data, natural language interactions, and fragmentations pose a massive challenge.

These can be addressed with digital technologies like Process discovery, Robotics process automation (RPA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), a lightweight and flexible solution. It will interact with legacy systems, help identify the right process for automation, digitize documents, process unstructured data, and provide insights to finance professionals to make informed and strategic decisions.

Some of the processes which have a high impact with RPA & AI are: Invoice capture & matching, Invoice processing, Credit Payables, Clearing & Settlement, EDI Exception handling, Inter-company accounting, Reconciliation, Payroll processing, General Ledger, Tax reclaims and Audit & compliance.

Enable contracts and supplier insights with AI to mitigate supplier risk

CPG industry is highly-regulated, where legal and regulatory frameworks are ever-evolving. Moreover, a failure to maintain effective control processes could lead to violations, unintentional or otherwise, of laws and regulations. It could be difficult as manually managing large volumes of contracts with suppliers, partners, distributors, retailers, foodservice operators, and others involve high costs in terms of fees to legal experts. The process is also slow and time-consuming.

It can be addressed if large amounts of supplier contracts are processed using AI-enabled solutions, thus ensuring contractual compliance, and mitigating supplier risk.

In addition to legal, procurement is another important function for any CPG enterprise. Besides ensuring timely procurement and at best cost, cost reduction and supplier risk management are other key priorities. They have limited visibility beyond tier-1 suppliers and improving analytical and reporting capabilities are critical. This is due to the unavailability of a single source of truth of spend data, inconsistent spend classification, and an unclear view on non-compliant spend.

AI-driven technologies can address the challenges by building intelligence into their supply chain models to mitigate supplier risk. It helps in maintaining accurate records of suppliers not just by type but also by levels of risk. Furthermore, with access to near real-time and accurate spend data through comprehensive spend analytics, procurement leaders are better positioned to renegotiate supplier contracts and create more reliable intelligence reports.

Transform helpdesk operations with RPA & AI to enhance CX

CPG enterprises with multiple brands and their respective SKUs face several challenges when it comes to customer service. The number of customers, suppliers, partners, as well as the number of systems in which the information resides is too much to handle easily.

Due to global expansion and presence in multiple countries, the IT landscape varies and has various versions with respect to similar businesses or regions. The underlying IT systems also have a combination of legacy and modern applications, with the number of applications increasing continuously over time.

While these enterprises go through many changes, percolating the process changes down to the helpdesk team and stakeholders like suppliers is a challenge:

These challenges can be addressed with an easy to use, intelligent and interactive self-service interface for customers. thus increasing the helpdesk team’s productivity. It will be accessible 24*7 to address queries and guide the stakeholders with the right next steps.

Enable business innovation with AI-led IT operations

One of the biggest challenges for the CIO are disintegrated IT operations team and information overload:

How can these be integrated and streamlined? How can CPG and retail enterprises innovate their IT operations to eliminate organizational silos, increasing efficiency, and agility?

Enter AIOps, that uses Big Data and scalable AI models to uncover anomalous patterns occurring in the IT landscape. By detecting IT issues proactively, intelligently identifying the root cause of anomalies, AIOps improves the predictability of IT operations. AI brings cognitive intelligence into ITOps, enabling self-healing, quicker issue resolution, and optimized enterprise performance.

Processing a massive volume of data from across the IT network is challenging. AIOps, the new game-changer, harnesses intelligence to transform critical business processes, enables better decision-making through data-led insight, and provides a 360-degree view of the operations, preparing enterprises to succeed in the future.