Business technology majors IBM has joined hands with SAP to offer a co-innovated solution for the retail and consumer packaged goods industries to help both increase profitability and improve the consumer experience.
The joint solution – as part of their digital transformation partnership — uses near real-time data to improve planning and execution in the physical store. Data sources, such as IBM’s Metro Pulse, flow through SAP Cloud Platform to provide insights that can be acted upon almost immediately.
IBM and SAP also intend to collaborate on SAP Model Company services, a prepackaged, ready-to-use, reference solution that can be customized to meet specific line-of-business and industry needs to accelerate the time to value.
IBM Metro Pulse uses IBM’s cognitive services to provide insights around weather, events, traffic and demographics and helps address industry challenges such as on-shelf availability and demand forecasting accuracy.
The solution has improved forecasting accuracy of volatile, hard-to-forecast products by 75 percent during trials of this cognitive technology across more than 100 stores in multiple American markets.
“SAP S/4HANA, coupled with access to data understood and reasoned by IBM’s cognitive services, can provide consumer product and retail business users across the C-suite with the specific insights to gain a competitive advantage in major markets,” said Laurence Haziot, IBM Global Managing Director and General Manager Consumer Industries.
“Through this collaboration between SAP and IBM, retailers and consumer products companies today can respond with speed, precision and confidence to locally relevant events,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, global general manager, Consumer Industries at SAP.
