Cognizance has some very experienced FMCG and business executives on their board. The board is formed by Neil Brimacombe (Ex Tiger Brands Exec), David Brown (Lead non exec Vodacom), and Stef Riccardi (CEO CKR Engineers). Additionally, Cognizance has strategic alliances with Retail Development Solutions Pty for Category Insights and Pack and Stack Merchandising Pty.
With this partnership, MACmobile is closing the loop on supply chain intelligence. Their solutions offering now encompasses every aspect of the supply chain, delivering a single version of the truth from manufacturing to consumer sales in the formal retail sector and to the Distributor/Wholesaler in the main market.
Consumer buying patterns and the way these result in over- and under-stocked products are crucial to end-to-end supply chain intelligence. Cognizance’s sophisticated Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based platform and Computer Vision capabilities are being integrated into MACmobile’s powerful suite of tools, as well as the robust Machine Learning capabilities underpinned by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support predictive patterns in these areas. The result is an extremely powerful, competency-driving solution based on a single data set across the entire supply chain, that assists revenue-influencing decisions on the ground.
“Ensuring that products are visible on shelf at all times is the crux of successful manufacturing and retail. However, actual sales and in-store data around execution, pricing, promotional and planogram compliance have always been the challenge. This has prevented complete insight across the value chain. With Cognizance on board, we have now added this last mile to our FIELDForce offering and will be available as feature going forward,” says Andrew Dawson, Managing Director at MACmobile.
With MACmobile’s offering augmented by Cognizance, daily retail sales feeds and basket data feeds (when made available), stock in store and stock at the distribution centre, can be recorded and made available in a live feed to a dynamic dashboard, the consulting team and partners at Cognizance will work with Retailers and Manufacturers alike to derive meaningful and actionable insights. This enables the manufacturer to identify Key Performance Areas (KPAs) against which performance benchmarks are established and deviations reported against. The deviation reporting is live and communication is made to merchandisers and/or retail management on the ground.
Cognizance’s computer vision technology provides real-time proof of repair, as well as execution and planogram compliance in each of a retailer’s channels. Pricing compliance is ensured via the reading of Perpetual Inventory (PI) labels and comparison of this data with a pricing data base per retail outlet. Over time, Cognizance is able to map retails sales per stock keeping unit (SKU), per store, per region, across the country, allowing for intelligent stock allocation, reducing returns and wastes and allowing for Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing to satisfy customer demand as it varies.
“The powerful analytical capabilities of FIELDForce, augmented by our partnership with Cognizance, closes the loop on supply chain analytics. Our customers have real-time access to a wealth of data to allow for proactive actionable remediation, instead of reactive event tracking. We can empower manufacturers to leverage a single version of the truth through the entire supply chain, so that they can move to optimal, JIT manufacturing across the country,” Dawson concludes.
