With the use of advanced technologies, Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) maker Colgate-Palmolive products’ average assortments have increased by 25 per cent in the last three years.

The average product assortment is the number of Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) that a company sells in a store. The increase in assortments aids in increasing in sales.

The company introduced ‘Smile Stores’ in all its retail outlets in the country; a concept that has aided them to provide accurate product recommendations to retailers and improve product availability. 

“We built software which looked at multiple data sets to arrive at a bespoke recommendation for every single outlet. To do that we looked at internal and external data sets as we had a history of how many stores are buying from us. We looked in what we wanted to drive and how do we make sure that new brands and SKUs opportunities are offered and how do we make sure that the right products are available at the right location,” Ruchir Bhatnagar, Executive Vice President of Customer Development at Colgate-Palmolive (India)Ltd told businessline. 

The company also looked at external data sets from allied agencies that provides them with cross reference of the demographics and economic indicators of consumers living in a locality. 

“A monthly priority assortment list is created and that is rolled out to every single of the outlets. The information was put into the order- taking tool and the sales representative will only get the list which is suited to the particular store. 65 out of 100 retailers that we send our recommendations to, they buy as per our recommendation,” he said. 

“The results have been fascinating as for many years, our average assortment has seen a dramatic increase over three years. The average assortment has gone up by about 25 per cent over the last three years,” he added.

The FMCG maker uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to mine data that came from Smile Stores and further sharpened it.

Modern Trade focus

The company is looking to expand its technology focus to modern trade.

“With modern trade becoming bigger and bigger and more stores emerging, today you can see that there would be stores in a 50,000 population town and independent modern trade outlets are coming up with stores which earlier used to be general stores. Enhancing our own products’ appeal inside modern trade stores became imperative for us to win,” added Bhatnagar.