Today, the retail market is the most widespread and complex due to its multiple supply chains. It covers people’s primary needs for food and necessities. Complex supply chains are the most in need of optimisation and automation. The increasing amount of data in the retail industry is a key reason for the raised use of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI transforms the retail industry and helps companies personalise the customer experience, optimise supply chains, and increase operational efficiency. AI allows companies to gain important insights into customer behaviour and preferences, which can be used to create more targeted and effective marketing efforts.
In this publication, we discuss retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) market trends and forecasts to 2023, market challenges, and use cases for IDP in retail and CPG.
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Retail and CPG market trends and forecasts to 2023
According to Fact.Mr, the market research and competitive intelligence provider, the global AI in the retail market is expected to reach a valuation of €77,51 billion by 2033, growing at a remarkable CAGR of 30.3% from 2023 to 2033. AI-powered personalisation will have an impact on sales and marketing divisions in the retail and CPG market. It can help retailers analyse customer data, create personalised shopping experiences, and significantly increase sales. In addition, IDP can help retailers create dynamic product catalogues that automatically update with the latest product information, pricing, and availability. This feature helps ensure that customers always have access to accurate and up-to-date product information. Moreover, IDP can help provide personalised product recommendations to customers based on their purchase history, browsing behaviour, and other relevant data. As a result, customers can discover products that are most relevant to their interests and needs. Advanced AI technologies like ChatGPT can help retailers implement a visual product search. This feature allows customers to search for products using images rather than text. It can make the shopping experience more intuitive and engaging.
Retail and CPG market challenges
However, large volumes of unstructured data come into organisations through emails, chats, and other forms of communication. This situation can slow down the work of companies and create difficulties. In this case, IDP can simplify the working process and speed up document processing.
1. A lot of paperwork in internal operations
Delayed document processing can lead to an excessive backlog of unprocessed paper documents. It results in a pile-up of internal operations.
2. A large number of invoices received from suppliers (e.g. wholesalers)
Sometimes organisations receive a disproportionate amount of invoices that need to be processed. This becomes a real challenge for retailers. IDP systems can meet this challenge and ensure a consistent flow of documents throughout the organisation.
3. Payments of supplier’s invoices
The AP team has to open individual emails with attached invoices and key into the company’s internal system to find a supplier’s ID and manually extract the data from the invoice. From there, an employee would have to enter the information into the internal accounting system so that the supplier could be paid.
4. Repetitive and time-consuming tasks
Sometimes organisations are faced with repetitive and monotonous tasks that result in time-consuming and error-prone work. The IDP can easily optimise tasks that pose operational challenges.
5. Increased risk of missed delivery deadlines
The timing of service delivery and payment is a key indicator of a company’s performance level. IDP helps to optimise repetitive tasks, reduce errors and missed deadlines.
6. Lost customers
A company can lose customers due to missed deadlines for the delivery of services and goods or delayed processing of documents. IDP avoids this problem by processing each customer’s requests and documents as accurately as possible. The system also makes it possible to monitor the volume of incoming requests and to increase capacity.
7. Diluted earnings
Diluted earnings per share (diluted EPS) measures the profitability of a company. Diluted EPS gives investors a more accurate picture of company’s earnings per share. This measure must be relevant and accurate for investors to understand and invest in a company’s success.
8. Missed data insights
Insights from the data can be missed or identified too late to take action. This problem can reveal inefficiencies in a company’s operations and lead to the loss of customers and valuable data. In today’s world, it is critical to act on data as soon as it is received.
Use cases for IDP in retail and CPG
Retail and CPG companies typically deal with multiple documents such as invoices, purchase orders, and receipts. These documents contain important data: product descriptions, prices, and customer information.
By capturing data from retail documents in a digital format, retailers can more easily analyse this data to identify trends and insights that can inform business decisions.
Processing of incoming customer inquiries (quote requests)
IDP systems can help retailers and CPG companies process customer quote requests accurately and on time. This demonstrates customer focus and creates a good customer experience for the client.
Tender document processing
This stage is critical to the company’s future orders. At the tender stage, a company is obliged to perform to the highest standard among its competitors. This is also primarily influenced by the time and the accuracy of the processing of the tender documents.
Purchase order recognition
This step is very important for a company. To be competitive, a retailer must process orders faster than others. The retail market is highly saturated. It is significant to offer customers the highest level of service to keep them coming back.
Sales order automation (SOA)
SOA streamlines manual, time-consuming, and necessary tasks in the sales process. This type of automation helps the sales team to focus on where they can add value to the sales process, rather than spending this time on data entry and administrative tasks that require little or no skills.
Conversion from the quote stage to the purchase stage
The IDP system helps the retail and CPG market to convert the customer from the bidding stage to the buying stage. For example, Graip.AI users can easily receive emails from customers in the system, clarify missing information with predefined email templates, have the possibility to auto-reply to specific emails, and see email threads. These functions help to convert the bidding stage to the buying stage faster.
Inventory management
Automation allows you to control the available quantity of your products in stock. Automating Excel inventory reconciliation process, the user will compare the imported Excel data against existing inventory records in 3-rd party inventory management solution. It matches the quantities, item descriptions, and other relevant information to identify any discrepancies.
Mapping customer’s product SKUs to your product items
For instance, Graip.AI applies the configured mapping rules between the customer’s product SKUs and ERP Product Master data. Then Graip.AI matches the extracted data from document customer SKUs with existing Product Master records in ERP. It performs a lookup or comparison process to identify the corresponding internal product identifiers that represent the same item.
Intelligent category management
IDP can be used to categorise products and manage the product hierarchy automatically. It applies AI to analyse product attributes and group them into logical categories.
Dynamic pricing
IDP can be used to implement dynamic pricing for products in the online catalogue. This process involves analysing data such as customer behaviour and competitor pricing. It helps automatically adjust product prices and optimise sales and revenue. Dynamic pricing is actively used in the tourism industry. Prices effectively change according to the season, approaching travel dates, and the number of hotel rooms or airline beds available.
Vendor onboarding and vendor data management
Vendor onboarding is the process of collecting the information needed to approve a company as a vendor and enable your organisation to conduct business, purchase goods and services, and make payments to that company. Automation helps select the most appropriate vendor and the terms of the contract with that vendor. The system then helps manage supplier data for efficient business operations.
Customer profile management and analysis
IDP can collect information about your clients and use it to create customer profiles and provide customer profile management and analysis.
Data capture from retail documents
The IDP system allows you to capture information from retail documents (price tags, receipts, product packaging, shipping notes) and transfer it to other systems or generate new documents.
Non-inventory invoice processing and management
Non-inventory items for sale can be bought, sold, and consumed but are not added to a purchase order or held in stock. They include warehouse costs, utility bills, travel expenses, etc. IDP helps accurately process and effectively manage this information.
Recognition and support of different report types
IDP can support the most common scenarios of sales Excel reports: financial, marketing, accounting, logistics, etc.
Collect, process, and categorise customer feedback and reviews
IDP technology, using tools such as ChatGPT, can analyse customer feedback, divide it by tone, and draw conclusions accordingly.
Process booking confirmation forms
Many retailers, especially those in the travel industry, use booking confirmation forms to manage reservations for flights, hotels, car rentals, and other travel services. These forms contain important data: customer information, booking details, and payment information. IDP can be used to automate the way booking confirmation forms are processed. It applies technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) to extract data from the forms and automatically place it in the appropriate fields.
Capture contract details
The IDP solution captures data from contracts, transfers it to the accounting systems, and generates new documents from this data.
Product image categorisation
Based on image analysis, products can be categorised in the website catalogue and accounting systems.
Complaint management
IDP also implements customer complaint management. The technology can receive, analyse, collate, and apply customer feedback to future work.
Graip.AI for retail and CPG
The Graip.AI platform is an AI assistant that creates structured and actionable data from various documents. It combines the power of rule-based robotic process automation and self-learning artificial intelligence. The platform recognises documents, processes data, and delivers it to target fields or systems such as SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Sales Force.
The Graip.AI platform offers a wide range of operational capabilities for retail and CPG companies of different sizes: invoice recognition, receipt recognition, passport and personal ID recognition, data extraction from an email scenario, and mapping of product features to the Customer Product Catalogue. The platform helps create an automated end-to-end processing flow instead of manually performing repetitive business tasks.
Graip.AI brings many benefits to retail and CPG companies:
1. Streamlined operations
You can achieve cost savings across the entire retail value chain, from sales to distribution.
2. Increased revenue
IDP helps to remove document-based bottlenecks, enabling more streamlined processes and faster turnaround times.
3. Improved employee engagement
By automating repetitive, error-prone tasks and removing human intervention, you can increase employee productivity and accuracy.
Conclusion
Technologies such as IDP have revolutionised the retail and CPG industries. Automation helps retailers improve all operational processes: from managing supplier data to collecting customer profiles and feedback. It makes the shopping experience easier and more comfortable for customers. IDP also allows you to deliver superior service, while your suppliers are still managing data manually with error-prone results.