Consumers are especially hard to satisfy when it comes to products they buy repeatedly and consider substitutable. Consumer products (CP) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, especially providers of perishable foods and other time-sensitive goods, have embraced DSD business models that take a soup-to-nuts approach to achieving customer loyalty, assuming full responsibility for product availability all the way to the retail shelf. The benefits of this model lie in ultimate control over the right SKUs appearing on the right store shelves at the right time, but with that comes the responsibility of coordinating a large network of store delivery teams with up to tens of thousands of routes. They also need to win the business trust of retail customers who may have conflicting shelf-stocking obligations to other CP and CPG competitors with substitutable product. And in the case of perishable products with limited shelf-life, the imperative to minimize waste makes this model especially valuable, but challenging.

Accurately forecasting the perfect order for each store location and then successfully coordinating the execution of each order between planners and route managers, at scale, is the ultimate goal.

Providing Optimal Order Recommendations to the DSD Frontline

Antuit.ai’s direct-store-delivery (DSD) Predictive Ordering solution ensures that your sales team and route operators meet consumer needs every time. This AI solution recommends orders considering base and promotional demand and all operational constraints, including case rounding, availability days, service days, and display builds. As part of its process, the solution leverages current orders, shipments, inventory, and promotion plans while providing key metrics to maximize sales and revenue. Deployed on a laptop or tablet, route operators, DSD planners, and sales center managers learn the solution quickly and appreciate its ease of use.

Deliver Store Orders Perfectly Aligned to Consumer Demand

Improved On-shelf Availability and Reduced Waste

leveraging the sophistication of AI modeling, forecast accuracy is enhanced by consideration of real-world constraints and rules resulting in fine-tuned replenishment orders down to the level of Store/SKU/Day.

Accelerated Planning and Communication

a behavioral science-based user interface facilitates timely ordering by frontline sales staff and increases route driver efficiency.

Responsive and Reliable for the Entire DSD Team

built on time-tested Cloud-native SaaS technology that is scalable to 10,000+ parallel users

Bimbo Bakeries USA (BBU) was experiencing significant losses due to stock-outs and margin erosion because their orders weren’t aligned to consumer demand. They required more precision ordering for their route sales teams to stop their financial and food waste. - Partnering with antuit.ai, the company deployed DSD Predictive Ordering across the US and Canada. After a short deployment, each route salesperson began to receive daily, optimized orders on their handheld device. Within three months, the company experienced a significant reduction in stock-outs and wastage, adding crucial revenue and margin to their bottom line.

Antuit.ai responded to our need for the “perfect order” with a solution that improved forecasting and delivered more accurate orders - in a user interface that enabled easier collaboration between our planners and route operators. Today, we depend on their solution for our entire 12,000 routes.

Morgan Smith, VP, DSD Center of Excellence at Bimbo

Our solutions are built upon antuit.ai’s world-class AI Demand Forecasting

Unified Demand Signal

Control for the differences between regions, stores, online, and even the fulfillment type, and serve as the connective tissue across financial, assortment, allocation, size, and pricing decisions.

Dynamic Aggregation

An analytic methodology to address data sparsity, avoid the impact of fringe sizes, handle new items, and protect unit minimums.

Omnichannel Profiling

Delivering demand profiles that consider store and online sales independently, but optimize for BOPIS and ship-from-store (SFS) aspects of inventory location.

Seamless Integration

Delivers pricing and forecasting results through API integration, feeding either antuit.ai’s application suite or existing ERP solutions.

Scalable Data

AI models capable of digesting data that accounts for every demand driver - including seasonality, price, product lifecycle, trends, and local events.

Cloud Native

Built natively in the cloud with scalable distributed processing.

Download Solution Sheet (PDF)