Alloy.ai, a software platform that helps consumer brands rapidly sense and adjust to changes in consumer demand and supply chain disruptions, today announced the launch of new features that make it the first Demand and Inventory Control Tower purpose-built for consumer brands. The Alloy.ai application is powered by a data platform that automatically aggregates and harmonizes point-of-sale (POS) data from all of a company’s retail and ecommerce channels, and syncs it with inventory and internal supply chain data from ERP systems. This gives Alloy.ai’s customers – such as Bic, Crayola, Ferrero, Melissa & Doug, Valvoline and others – instant visibility into demand and inventory across their own networks and those of their retailers.
With today’s launch, Alloy.ai puts best-practice metrics and workflows at users’ fingertips. Now, upon launching Alloy.ai, users are greeted with a dedicated Launchpad pre-configured with best-practice guided workflows and templatized dashboards drawn from Alloy.ai’s years of experience working with consumer brands. This makes it easier than ever to turn disparate retail, ecommerce and supply chain data into insights to grow sales, save time, reduce waste and decrease costs. Launchpad is immediately available for all new customers, and existing customers will be able to take advantage of the power of Launchpad in the coming weeks.
“We quickly realized that Alloy.ai could unlock a vault of valuable actionable insights, taking us far beyond the simple reporting requirements,” said Matthew Bergum, director of power tools at Bosch Canada, which uses Alloy.ai to grow sales at retailers like The Home Depot and Lowe’s. “The automated harmonization of daily, SKU and store-level data provided by Alloy.ai and its easy-to-use interface surfaces relevant insights for each of our team members to make more intelligent decisions for their part of the business. Additionally, Alloy.ai has significantly increased our overall efficiency. Now our sales team is spending less time manually manipulating Excel reporting and more time driving sales growth using the insights provided by Alloy.ai.”
The new pre-configured dashboards give consumer brands instant visibility into:
- POS sales trends: Gain a granular understanding of omni-channel POS sales trends across retailers, geographies and time horizons to answer complex, ad hoc sales questions quickly.
- Lost retail sales: Isolate the biggest contributors to lost sales and out-of-stocks from all retail partners, and take action. Alloy.ai flags, predicts and then recommends precise areas where orders should be placed or reorder points should be increased.
- Excess inventory: Get a view of weeks of supply by product, distribution center and retail partner which incorporates open purchase orders to address high stock before it becomes too late. This saves time by automating the work of finding opportunities to improve service and keep inventory levels balanced.
- Performance vs plan: Track high-frequency demand signals against forecast. Understand and be alerted where sales are deviating from plan to inform corrective action, making it easy to assess retailer buying patterns to ensure they’re aligned to short-term demand forecasts as well as historical trends.
Alloy.ai power users can still customize their own analysis by choosing from more than 350 consumer goods-specific metrics ready for cross-retailer analysis, including marketing promotion analysis, phantom inventory, new item execution, geographic analysis and more.
“In today’s volatile business climate things change quickly. There’s no more waiting days or weeks to find out how your product is performing or where you might be experiencing problems. For the first time, brands can now get insights and take action in seconds,” said Joel Beal, co-founder and CEO of Alloy.ai. “With more than 40 million SKU-location combinations actively being analyzed in the Alloy.ai platform — and by working with dozens of consumer brands which are category leaders — we’ve built best practices for managing sales and supply chains directly into our product.”
In tandem with this new launch, the company also rebranded from Alloy to Alloy.ai — a move that highlights the company’s AI capabilities and predictive workflows.
“The promise of AI for the consumer goods space is not some far-off dream – it’s happening right now,” said Logan Ensign, chief customer officer at Alloy.ai. “AI is only as good as the data it’s based on, and Alloy.ai has been providing customers access to high-quality, harmonized data about their businesses for years. Each day, our customers harness the power of AI in Alloy.ai to monitor retail forecast accuracy, analyze unconstrained demand and use predictive modeling to foresee product stockouts before they even occur. These groundbreaking capabilities are unlocking millions in revenue and cost reductions, as well as significantly boosting efficiency for the organizations that adopt them.”
Alloy.ai was recently named a Retail Analytics leader in the latest G2 Spring 2023 Grid Report. This is the second time that Alloy.ai has earned this important designation. The honor was awarded based on the company’s strong customer satisfaction scores, with 94% of users saying they would be likely to recommend Alloy.ai.
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