#channel visibility

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How channel visibility helps make smarter business decisions

Download our PoV to understand the importance of channel visibility and how it helps to make effective business decisions for building an ef

Download our PoV to understand the importance of channel visibility and how it helps to make effective business decisions for building an efficient global supply chain.

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Harnessing the power of AI for channel visibility

As a sales or marketing professional, we are always exploring ways to discover the ground realities of the market, including the customer's buying behaviour and the channels our brands pass through to reach the end customer. If we are successful in capturing the true picture of market dynamics, we can device an informed promotional and pricing strategy that helps sell our products better than the competitors. This closer view of our product’s journey to the consumer through multiple channels like distributors, wholesalers and retailers can be called channel visibility.

Complete visibility into channels has been a priority for supply chain managers for decades. Channel visibility in terms of stock, customer orders and transactions has a huge role to play in planning inventory, routing shipments and customer service.

In today’s age of digital disruption, it has become more important to stay connected with the customers and provide greater service to retain them. With the advent of technology, businesses have transformed the way they function. Aboard the digital transformation journey, companies can leverage emerging technologies to get a closer look at the market and have a deeper understanding of their channel partners in order to improve their promotional strategy and customer service.

The ever-evolving customer expectations has urged enterprises to think beyond the legacy systems. Advanced analytics and intelligent technologies are enabling enterprises to fulfil customer demands while achieving higher standards of quality and efficiency. Artificial intelligence powered channel partner management software helps increase visibility across supply chain network, enabling a customer-driven integrated marketing approach, which can ensure transparency and efficiency. AI helps form a consistent pattern, helping derive insights from the data, which in turn helps make strategic decisions. Let’s explore how AI helps revolutionize global channel management.

Data Management – Too much data can also cause visibility challenges. Imagine a scenario in a retail store, where they have PoS (Point of Sale) systems, which record sales at an individual invoice level, giving out data in terms of sales at every bill. This explodes into huge volumes of data on a daily basis. AI-enabled channel management software deployed at the partner’s premise can help templatize the format in which they record and share sales and enables timely, accurate insights and visibility into sales, order, and inventory data through a robust data pipeline. 

Data Optimization – Collaborating with too many channel partners can be quite overwhelming for businesses. Though expanding business in new and emerging markets widens horizons for our brands, adding new channel partners each day can be daunting as it adds to the current challenges with existing channel partners. 

Most of our channel partners have systems deployed in their premise, which means they are in full control over the data and we are completely dependent on their willingness to share the information. This is where technology comes to the rescue. On cloud Distribution Management Systems (DMS) bridge sales visibility gaps in the manufacturers’ value chain through an intuitive and highly configurable ERP solution. In short, the on-premise invoicing/billing systems are transferred to the cloud. This helps in various ways.

1. As all the channel partners are now going through the same system, it helps eliminate the complexity of dealing with more than one system. 

2. Single system on cloud means process standardization. The business processes are configured in the system and all the channel partners follow the same.

3. This is real-time, so the channel partners are creating real invoices on the distribution management system (DMS) and the companies get immediate access to the invoices, thus getting near real-time visibility.

For an enterprise, DMS brings trust into data - As the system is no more in one person’s control and on cloud, there’s a higher level of trust, when it comes to the data recorded into the system. For a distributor – it is the ease of not investing into any more apps on their premise. It is definitely a win-win situation for both. 

Data Harmonization – Disparity in data is another problem, which occurs as the product code for a particular product given by the Channel Partner would be completely different from the one given by the parent company. And while reporting sales, the Channel Partner would use their code, which won’t match with the company records. This needs contextualizing of external business data and making it insight-ready. Leveraging the Natural Language Processing capabilities of AI, can help collect data coming from different regions and in different languages, translate it into English, keeping it contextual to the business/category that the client is operating in.

Summary

Channel Visibility impacts the performance of a product today more than ever. Today’s customer is both informed and impatient and therefore, it is becoming increasingly hazardous for brands to overlook the significance of channel management. It is expected of a company to know the status of their inventory along with the product information. Companies which have failed to achieve this have faced steep consequences. For instance, Nike had faced protests and boycotts by Georgetown University students in 2015 over its supply chain practices, while Unilever learnt from Nike’s experience and committed to transparency about its sources.

Artificial intelligence has helped address various challenges in channel management including channel visibility. Collectively, the evolution has been seamless. From gathering data to providing trusted data to making sense of that data and then data centralization through data harmonization and getting all the data onto the data warehouse, from where we can report and drive business AI-powered apps, wherein we use predictive capability, WHAT IF analysis and Optimization, which in turn helps manage data and gain insights from it. 

Given the ways AI is transforming supply chain, it is no wonder the way e-commerce and B2B supply chains have come so far leveraging cognitive technologies. Companies adopting AI are surely seeing dramatic improvements in their ability to respond to customers, distributors and the changing dynamics of the market. However, those who haven’t taken the digital path are soon going to be left behind.

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WEBINAR: Using Partner Segmentation to Increase Revenues and Profits from Your Channel

“Segmenting your partners, and aligning partner programs or market development efforts based on partner behavior can yield significant benefits to your channel initiatives.  Use ‘decision-grade’ channel visibility for partner segmentation and see the results! Join Zyme, and industry expert, Desa Zraick for a webinar on Partner Segmentation to learn more.”

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/600398689