IRI®, a global leader in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, today released a new IRI Point of View, “Pitch Perfect: Orchestrating the Collaboration Imperative,” outlining the significant benefits that CPG manufacturers and retailers reap through the use of collaborative technology platforms. According to the report, CPG companies that leverage advanced technology, such as IRI Retail Collaborative Gateways, are transforming the retailer-supplier relationship from store-centric to customer-centric, achieving a singular view of market challenges and opportunities to provide positive customer experiences that strengthen customer loyalty and grow customer lifetime value.
“CPG retailers and suppliers have clearly recognized the need to collaborate to win in today’s challenging marketplace,” said Brad Shelton, president of Collaborative Gateway Solutions for IRI. “Three-quarters of manufacturers that are leveraging our gateways are using the collaborative platforms to better communicate with their retailer partners, and they are finding retailers very eager to act on their insights. The results of this shift are remarkable and clearly demonstrated by outsized growth.”
In the report, IRI outlines that CPG retailers and manufacturers leveraging advanced collaboration technology experienced accelerated growth along three key growth levers:
- Process Improvements: When retailers and suppliers use collaboration technology platforms to achieve and maintain a more customer-centric view of the marketplace through a shared portal, the partners may be able to identify and implement process improvements to drive growth. IRI’s report provides examples of the ways retailers and suppliers use these tools to improve coordination and streamline processes around new product launches, on-shelf availability and demand forecasting.
- Cost Reduction: As the CPG industry continues to chase wider profit margins, effective cost management is critical for success. Technology-enabled collaborative portals linking suppliers, distribution centers, and the retail store allow for improved alignment among purchase orders, shipments and inventory, which may unlock enhanced supply chain efficiencies and allow retailers to capture revenues previously lost due to out-of-stocks.
- Revenue and margin enhancement: Successfully maximizing sales and margins in CPG depends on retailers’ customer-centricity, and their ability to leverage data to inform the proper assortment and presentation at the point of sale. Advanced collaboration technology allows retailers to combine their POS insights capabilities with their suppliers’ product development and marketing expertise to produce creative and curated assortments that resonate with highest-value customers and support revenue and margin enhancement. In fact, some companies are outperforming the market by up to four percentage points through this new level of collaboration.
Advanced collaborative technology platforms, like the IRI Retail Collaborative Gateways, create a North-Star vision that allows partner to collaborate more effectively and drive mutually beneficial outcomes. Retailers reap the benefits of visibility into total-market opportunity, competitive benchmarking, and leakage, while suppliers gain a deeply granular, store-level understanding of how their customers shop for their brands.
“The IRI Retail Collaborative Gateways allow fast and secure integration of data sets from retailers, CPG partners, and third-party suppliers, and provide consistently aligned and fully integrated data through a single point of access,” added Shelton. “It’s game-changing technology that paves the way for quick and agile decision-making at a time when speed and agility are table stakes. Those that can’t keep up will be left in the dust.”
About the Report
“Pitch Perfect: Orchestrating the Collaboration Imperative” is a free report available from IRI. To download the report, visit: https://www.iriworldwide.com/en-US/Insights/Publications/Retail-Collaboration-Imperative.
Helpful Link
Charticle: Elevate the Customer Experience with End-to-End Supply Chain Collaboration
About the IRI Partner Ecosystem
IRI fundamentally believes that delivering differentiated growth for clients requires deep, highly integrated partnering with a variety of best-of-breed companies. As such, IRI works closely with a broad range of industry leaders across multiple industries and sectors to create innovative joint solutions, services and access to capabilities to help its clients more effectively collaborate and compete in their various markets and exceed their growth objectives. IRI is committed to its partnership philosophy and continues to actively enhance its open ecosystem of partners through alliances, joint ventures, acquisitions and affiliations. The IRI Partner Ecosystem includes such leading companies as 84.51°, Adobe, The Boston Consulting Group, Clavis Insights, comScore, Data Plus Math, Dynata, Edison, Experian, GfK, Gigwalk, Google, Ipsos, Jumpshot, Mastercard Advisors, MaxPoint, Ogury, Omnicom, One Click Retail, Oracle, Pinterest, Simulmedia, SPINS, Univision, Viant, and others.
About IRI
IRI is a leading provider of big data, predictive analytics and forward-looking insights that help CPG, OTC health care organizations, retailers, financial services and media companies grow their businesses. A confluence of major external events — a change in consumer buying habits, big data coming into its own, advanced analytics and personalized consumer activation — is leading to a seismic shift in drivers of success in all industries. With the largest repository of purchase, media, social, causal and loyalty data, all integrated on an on-demand, cloud-based technology platform, IRI is empowering the personalization revolution, helping to guide its more than 5,000 clients around the world in their quests to remain relentlessly relevant, capture market share, connect with consumers, collaborate with key constituents and deliver market-leading growth. For more information, visit www.iriworldwide.com.
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