Cognizance Processing has announced a partnership with MACmobile, a provider of end-to-end Supply Chain platforms designed for the specific needs of FMCG Route to Market sales and distribution within the African market.

Having built a platform that can support “live” streaming of  formal market retail “sales out” data from till points (where available) as well as map the relevant stock holding in store simultaneously. Catering for the Distribution to Wholesaler/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.

With this partnership, MACmobile is able to close 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 MACmobile on board, we have now added warehousing and RTM distribution data from FIELDForce integrated directly into the Data Lake,” says Andrew Dawson, Managing Director at Cognizance.

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 Cognizance, augmented by our partnership with MACmobile, 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.

Editorial contacts:

MACmobile

Lindsay Britz

Digital Marketing Manager

Tel: 012 665 0601

Email: lindsay@cognizance.vision