Supply chain technology company MACmobile and image recognition company Cognizance Processing have partnered to provide a live view of the retail sector supply chain from manufacturing to consumer sales and to the distributor or wholesaler in the main market, says MACmobile commercial director Andrew Dawson.

Cognizance built a platform that can support live streaming of formal market retail "sales out" data from till points, if available, as well as to map the relevant stock holding in store simultaneously.

Catering for the distribution to wholesaler or retailer market in the informal sector, Cognizance has adapted the platform to reflect “sales in” data to retailers while mapping stock holding in the multiple warehouses being used in the distribution supply chain.

"Consumer buying patterns and the way these result in over- and under-stocked products are crucial to end-to-end supply chain intelligence. Our partnership enables us to deliver the last mile of supply chain intelligence."

Cognizance’s sophisticated Amazon Web Services-based platform and computer-vision capabilities are being integrated into MACmobile’s suite of tools along with robust machine learning capabilities that support the identification of predictive patterns to underpin revenue-influencing decisions on the ground by providing a powerful, competence-driving solution based on a single data-set across the entire supply chain.

With MACmobile’s offering augmented by Cognizance's platform, 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.

“Ensuring that products are visible on shelves 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 a challenge and has prevented complete insight across the value chain. With Cognizance on board, we have now added this last-mile to our FieldForce offering and it will be available as feature going forward,” says Dawson.

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.

Further, pricing compliance is ensured through the reading of perpetual inventory labels and comparison of this data with a pricing database per retail outlet. Over time, Cognizance is able to map retail sales per stock keeping unit, 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 consulting team and partners at Cognizance will work with retailers and manufacturers to derive meaningful and actionable insights. This enables the manufacturer to identify key performance areas 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.

“The powerful analytical capabilities of FieldForce augmented by our partnership with Cognizance closes the loop on supply chain analytics. Our solutions offering now encompasses every aspect of the supply chain and delivering a single version of the truth. 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.