The Value of Enterprise Intelligence
Note: Formerly called Enterprise Demand Intelligence, in 2023 The Parker Avery Group rebranded our analytics offerings to Enterprise Intelligence to reflect expanded scope of functional areas the solution encompasses, such as retail price optimization and markdown optimization.
As the retail and CPG industries continue to adapt to a post-pandemic environment, advances in technology, coupled with massively changed competitive and global dynamics, have put increased pressure on the hyper-critical nature of strategic decisions. Retail and consumer brand leaders understand that a solid grasp of internal and external data sources, the implementation of advanced analytics, and the resulting intelligence are all needed more than ever. It is in this light that the value of Parker Avery’s Enterprise Intelligence is a key differentiator to traditional advanced analytics solutions.
Intelligence is the key. While increased acceptance plus advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) make compelling arguments, both retail and CPG industries need a broader and more strategic view of incorporating analytics into their business models.
Introducing Enterprise Intelligence
Enterprise Intelligence represents the infusion of Parker Avery’s cutting-edge analytics platform with some of the retail industry’s most experienced business process and change management consultants. This holistic approach results in meaningful results and greater financial benefit for our clients.
Above all, Parker Avery’s goal is to be a trusted advisor to our clients—through the good and challenging times equally. We are fortunate to have enjoyed lasting, strong professional and personal relationships with many of our clients. The value of Enterprise Intelligence is that it allows us to deepen those relationships as we help clients integrate, design, and adopt new and better ways of operating, propelled by advanced analytics, industry-leading business practices, and practical change management tactics adapted to their unique environments.
Determining the Best Solution
As a firm, The Parker Avery Group has completed countless software selection projects for our clients, across the broad spectrum of retail business functions: merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, item planning, retail pricing, promotions, and so on. During these initiatives, our guiding principle is to integrate our knowledge of industry solutions and best practices while maintaining objectivity to determine the solution that meets a company’s desired future-state business and technical requirements.
Bottom line: we meet our client’s needs by thoroughly evaluating appropriate contenders and suggesting the best solution that meets their unique requirements.
We hold this same principle with Enterprise Intelligence: what our clients need may not always be our own advanced analytics offerings. It does no good to claim we are a trusted, objective advisor, and then push a solution set that is not the best fit for a client. At the end of the day, Parker Avery and our partners do well when our clients’ needs are most optimally satisfied. For our solution partners, we continue to supplement their execution systems with the infusion of our team’s deep retail and consumer goods industry expertise.
All that being said, let’s give a brief overview of Parker Avery’s Enterprise Intelligence, and why we enthusiastically offer this array of services.
At the end of the day, Parker Avery and our partners do well when our clients’ needs are most optimally satisfied.
What Makes Enterprise Intelligence Different?
Unparalleled industry expertise built into your business processes
Parker Avery’s Enterprise Intelligence seamlessly interweaves advanced analytics into retail and CPG business processes. Many software providers claim to provide this, but the difference lies in our firm’s deep industry expertise. This fusion of deep science with the business is driven by Parker Avery retail and consumer goods professionals who have made business decisions countless times under varying circumstances during their industry tenures. Our team has worked in the retail industry for decades, in leadership and consulting roles, and we use this expertise to ensure our analytics solutions are fully integrated into your business processes.
Why is this so important? The proliferation and increasing quality of open-source AI and ML tools with the combination of cloud computing have led to an explosion of the application of AI in retail systems. Data science departments and analytics programs are becoming ubiquitous throughout many industries. Retail and CPG are no exception.
The evolution of algorithms is happening at an ever-faster rate. AI and ML technologies have infiltrated every aspect of the business from retail planning and pricing to fulfillment and operations. Amazon has been leading this charge with great success. There is no question that the landscape is changing rapidly, and current events are expediting the matter.
Any recommendation driven by machine learning must make the decision more intuitive by providing insight into why the recommendation is being made.
What remains is the need for analytics insights to be seamlessly integrated into retail business processes. Because we believe full automation in many parts of the business is still a long way off, the ultimate decisions across enterprises are still made by people. The value garnered from AI/ML integration rests with the decision-makers in the business. Therefore, any integration of artificial intelligence must be tailored to these roles. Further, any recommendation driven by machine learning must make the decision more intuitive by providing the accompanying insight into why the recommendation is being made. The lack of such insight from the analytics, regardless of the quality of the recommendation, renders it superfluous.
A single view of demand across multiple hierarchies and time horizons
Very few systems offer a single view of demand across multiple hierarchies and time horizons. Our dynamic hierarchy capability slices the demand signal utilizing a functional role-defined view of hierarchy with enterprise-wide visibility. This capability eliminates the need to manage multiple versions of the demand forecast.
Parker Avery’s Enterprise Intelligence platform is the first to produce a unified signal that can be translated to the KPI of choice within and across all functional areas of the enterprise, empowering unencumbered visibility, analysis, and collaboration. This capability also enables changes in one functional area to be dynamically reflected across the enterprise, in the appropriate level of detail.
Further differentiators of Enterprise Intelligence:
A common forecast and demand drivers seamlessly feed to any upstream or downstream system and translate to the appropriate metrics (e.g., sales, units, AUR, packs), making existing capabilities much more intelligent.
Dynamic aggregation improvements with reinforcement learning components continuously make the system more efficient.
ML-based disaggregation across time series with machine learning uses existing attribution and hierarchy more appropriately without adding business workload.
Using our optimized platform, Enterprise Intelligence enables retailers and CPG companies to use their resources more efficiently, thus spending less on cloud computing.
The solution easily scales to accommodate the globe’s largest retailers’ needs and enables deep-level processing with the latest generation of computing power.
Enterprise Intelligence Bridges the AI/Business Gap
The pursuit of cutting-edge analytics is important, but it is only one component of what is necessary to realize the value in the age of AI. Innovation and incorporation of the latest AI/ML algorithms lead to accurate recommendations that are only financially measurable when trusted by the organization. Through decades of hands-on experience architecting and implementing demand platforms for some of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods and retail clients, we learned that building trust was generally the most time-intensive.
We strongly believe that the journey into analytics should always begin with business decisions in mind.
Too often, major implementations of analytical systems fail not because of the quality of the data, science, and algorithms—but because of the misalignment with the business process, lack of clarity of the recommendation, and the organization’s hesitation to understand and accept the new way of thinking and operating.
Parker Avery’s approach to integrating Enterprise Intelligence into our clients’ environments bridges those gaps.
We strongly believe that the journey into analytics should always begin with business decisions in mind. It should consider what would incentivize the final decision-maker to move forward with a given allocation method or a replenishment suggested order quantity, take the suggested markdown, or keep from overwriting the forecast in the demand plan. Hindsight analysis of the decision, though useful, can be short-circuited by business process design and a change management plan that starts before the data is ever pulled for implementation.
The value of Enterprise Intelligence is that we uniquely tailor AI/ML to your challenges and integrate intelligence across your business with a meaningful, actionable, and collaborative approach.
If you’re ready to have a conversation to understand how Enterprise Intelligence can help your business, please reach out to us and we will set up a time to chat.
Contributor
The Parker Avery Group is a leading retail and consumer goods consulting firm that transforms organizations and optimizes operational execution through development of competitive strategies, business process design, deep analytics expertise, change management leadership, and implementation of solutions that enable key capabilities.
