In recent news, Nike made a shocking announcement that they were acquiring Celect, a predictive analytics and demand sensing software company, to fuel its consumer-direct offense strategy. The goal for Nike, despite their brand innovation and trendy fashion, is to better serve their customers on a more personal level by leveraging an AI platform to become hyper-focused on consumer behavior. This point of differentiation was underscored by Eric Sprunk, Nike, Inc. Chief Operating Officer, who stated:
“As demand for our product grows, we must be insight driven, data-optimized and hyper-focused on consumer behavior. This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale.” 1
For most, this news spurs a “call to action” to make their assortment planning and consumer buying decisions more analytically sophisticated, blending art and science, to answer the age old question – what, where, when, and how to best satisfy my consumers’ demand while maximizing my profitability potential?
One of the key reasons Nike acquired Celect was to improve the Assortment Planning process. This foundational practice is the cornerstone of any organization to improve purchasing of products, align to latest market trends, and ensure the purchase quantity meets consumer demand. With an omni-channel focus, more retailers are relying on planners, buyers, and allocation teams to grow endless aisle experiences, localize assortment decisions, and understand the role of each category seamlessly.
At Antuit, we value the power of AI and machine learning to transform business processes like Assortment Planning. To achieve this, we infuse analytics into the planning process for our clients to provide an automated and scalable solution in four simple steps:
This four-step approach is exactly why companies, like Nike, are bringing advanced analytics in-house. Actionized, a retail advisory firm and partner of Antuit, leads this change management process to effectively operationalize these steps to give companies a “Customer First” approach to product development and alignment to “Voice of Customer” locally. These consumer centric insights enable Merchandising and Planning to make more informed decisions that reduces disparity between company strategy and consumer demand. Eric G. Prengel, Managing Partner, Actionized, articulates this point clearly:
“Without the use of AI based analytics infused into your Assortment Planning Process, it is impossible for a merchandising team to identify what is truly important to a customer and what trends are driving their decision making. It’s time for retailers to add insight to their already complex design and buying processes’”
By automating and scaling this process for our clients, decisions are made faster with less risk across millions of decisions in a matter of seconds, placing the art of decision-making back into the hands of those who love buying and planning most.
1 Nike News, “Nike, Inc. Acquires Data Science and Demand Sensing Expert Celect”