Global Positioning System

There is a definite link between Retail & Infrastructure sector but there is one more link, i.e. their customer strategy. Associating cement to supermarkets is about how a company can learn from the companies from other industries. In this era of high competition chance favors a prepared mind. Competition favors a prepared company. Therefore, those companies that can improve their relative position during hard times gain a clear edge. This is the time to stress differentiation over productivity. The focus is required on value-added differentiation and not just price competition as it is a business assumption than a strategy.

Mr. Sampat, Commercial Head with a cement company was performing data analysis on the customer data of his company using his newly learnt data analysis skills. He soon realized that customers kept on changing their orders most of the times. The price of cement is largely determined by the transportation costs involved in delivering the cement. Due to such frequent changes in the orders by the customers, the delivery time and transportation costs were higher.

On further analyzing customer behavior, he thought that if he could know the exact location of the trucks carrying the cement bags by any means he could resort to a redeployment strategy that can reduce the over all transportation cost and delivery time. He called up his friend who was working with a courier and freight company to know how his company tracked merchandising and how it predicted demands for picking deliveries from various locations.

He thought for a Global Positioning System and then contacted a telecom company to put Global Positioning System (GPS) in their trucks. He then devised a central tracking and redeployment system. And, with this new system even if the order changed, the company could deliver more quickly than its competitor. It reduced its delivery cycle from 120 hours to 15 Hours, reduced its truck fleet by 4% and improved reliability from 24% to 78%.

The company thus learnt to correctly identify its crucial IT and business priorities. The analysis was typical of most businesses in that it learnt that, left to their own resources, projects would multiply and profits would decline. Instead the company analyzed its 30+ current IT projects in terms of value to the customer, resource utilization and possible productivity improvements. The company stopped 25 projects, slowed down 8, maintained 5, accelerated 3 and added 2.

Similarly, the winners in the supermarket industry will be those that will use new digital tools to create a customer-responsive way of doing business. Retailers, distributors and manufacturers will have to share data efficiently and effectively in a manner so that they communicate fully. Transactional data is just a subset of what you really want to know.