Consumer Packaged Goods
Business and Inventory Challenges
Customer service is an ultimate goal of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) goods supply chain. Improving service levels not only creates customer satisfaction, but it also yields an impressive financial improvement. At a constant "cost-to-serve," reducing out-of-stocks increases the top line, dropping most of the additional gross margin to the bottom line.CPG used to be a strictly fast-moving product business. Now, with so much product and SKU-Location proliferation, companies are dealing with a wide range of fast to slow moving demand behaviors. That can be hard to manage, achieving excellent service levels and respecting working capital and other financial limitations.
And a big problem in CPG is forecasting. Generating good forecasts is still difficult for even the best managed companies. Despite efforts to improve them, most forecasts are not getting much better and poor forecast accuracy remains a problem plaguing most companies.
ToolsGroup's Unique Capabilities
In this environment, ToolsGroup has the ability to deliver stable, reliable and very high service levels, despite increasing pressure from product proliferation. In addition, we deliver improved short-term forecast accuracy, which is critical to achieving very high levels of service. Many ToolsGroup customers in this industry are already obtaining 99+% service levels.ToolsGroup solutions also address many of the specific needs of CPG companies such as handling:
- Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI)
- Continuous Replenishment Planning (CRP)
- Complex multi-echelon network models
- Product expiration constraints
- Rough cut capacity planning
Successes
ToolsGroup is successfully deployed at more than 30 consumer packaged goods customers, such as:- Avon Products
- British American Tobacco (BAT)
- Colgate-Palmolive
- Energizer
- Georgia-Pacific
- Fater (A Procter & Gamble Company)
- And many others