Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) industry has experienced highest growth during 2020 compared to last five years. Growth is primarily driven by pandemic-induced disruptions and changed consumer habits.
Notable changes in consumer shopping behavior have brought unprecedented circumstances for CPG market players. As per McKinsey’s report, smaller companies raised their market shares from 18.2% in 2019 to 19.2% in 2020. However, the market share for large companies or established CPG brands fell from 51.2% in 2019 to 50.5% in 2020.
CPG companies are facing a challenging physical environment, volatility in consumer demands, and supply chain disruptions. To counter the prevailing scenario, CPG firms are focusing on building up their capabilities to have better customer engagement across multiple channels. Innovation and the right combination and integration across physical and digital channels, payment gateways, AR/VR, smart appliances, etc., is what may drive the growth of the CPG firms.
CPG Industry Key Market Trends
End to end consumer experience is changing and the change is here to stay.
While, it has been in priority list of the CPG Firm CXOs all along, with the COVID-19 impact it may become the matter of survival for many of them to innovative and establish newer ways for consumer engagement. They need to drive consumer loyalty and context-specific advocacy and experience. Right combination and integration across physical and digital channels, payment gateways, voice assistance, wearables, AR/VR, smart appliances … etc., is what may drive growth of the CPG companies. CPG firms are beefing up capabilities to have unified engagement across multiple channels TV, Social (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, others)
Channel Strategy re-evaluation is underway, to align with the new touch points in consumer journey.
With new customer touchpoints inducted in the customer journey and customer buying pattern changing in COVID-19 circumstances, the CPG firms are relooking into their existing models of connect and reach to consumers. This needs integration with new direct and intermediary channels and trimming parts of the multi-channel where RoI is going to be below par under changed scenario. CPG firms are enhancing their capabilities to manage increased demand coming through e-channels.
New Product Introduction process under sharper focus of CXOs.
The Pandemic also brought opportunity for the CPG players to innovate, develop and launch new products to cater to new consumer needs relevant to current scenario. Those with well-orchestrated, agile process and technology in place to fast unify various organizational functions to innovate and introduce new products in market, have been able to cash in on the opportunity. Now that the need for process and technology to fast collaborate and innovate has been well appreciated, CPG organization CXOs are to keep this area in their sharp focus and look for more technological enablement.
Data and Analytics’ role as a differentiator has become even stronger under pandemic situation.
The need for the CPG business to sense, decide, act quickly and operate with certainty the business, requires that the right insight is made available at the appropriate touchpoint is critical to drive the right actions. While the trend is already there, in the post-COVID world CPG firms are likely to increase investment in adaptive data platforms, advanced analytical tools, and AI/machine learning capabilities and turn data into a strategic advantage
Supply Chain resilience is under test.
COVID-19 has shown that to many CPG companies that they are not fully aware of the vulnerability of their supply chain relationships to large scale global shocks. Supply chain control towers are to be used now more proactively to distinguish breaks and chokes in their current production network and identify alternative routes to market in the event of further disruptions. There is renewed energy and rush to explore technologies that dramatically improve visibility and predictability across the supply chain, including intelligent control towers that leverage artificial intelligence, IoT, robotics, “digital twins” for better control and optimization if the network. Need to build SCRM (SC Risk Management) framework to continuously assess SC risks and evolve mitigation strategies.
How ITC Infotech Can Assist CPG Firms Cope
up With Changes
CPG companies are rapidly transforming themselves to enhance efficiency, stay competitive, and delight customers. Most of the CPG firms are on their journey of digital transformation to deliver customer expectations.
“Organizations need to be connected to be responsive and agile to deal with the dynamics around, changing almost on a day-to-day basis”, says Debjyoti Paul, President, ITC Infotech.
ITC Infotech is working with leading global CPG companies on their digital initiatives. It includes consumer engagement, trade marketing, omnichannel commerce, intelligence platforms, integrated supply chain operations, embedding analytics, and automation.
The CPG industry is process-driven and requires high operational efficiency. We bring you process automation solutions that reduce complexity, simplify work and bring agility to the processes. We have built multiple value modelers that will help accelerate the time to value for automation. Some of the key accelerators are:
- CPG-Retail automation playbook: a ready reference guide to exploring high automation propensity areas to yield benefits to clients
- Comprehensive process catalogs to facilitate extensive enterprise-wide scans
- Easy reference demos showcasing automation
- ‘Tune-n-Deploy’ ready bots for faster time to production
ITC Infotech can help streamline your business and support all HR, IT, and Finance functions with RPA and AI to drive growth, operational efficiency, and productivity.
ITC Infotech is helping CPG businesses improve the ROI on trade spend and deliver profitable growth with a fully integrated and intelligent trade planning and execution (IPE) solution. Our IPE solution enables trade planners to dynamically translate trade plans to operational and enables sales rep to execute them in near real-time. It empowers sales reps at every point in the journey with hyper-localized, outlet level and near real-time insights on assortments, media mix and promotion effectiveness.
“Digitization, Cloud Migration, Direct to Consumer are the initiatives taken up by the CPG companie”s- Praveen Gururaja. Director- Industry Solutions – Retail & Consumer Goods, Microsoft
“Realtime Data, Leveraging data for optimizing trade investments is one of the priorities. Made significant investments in Advanced Analytics. Platform centric approach instead of siloed approach would be of great help in leveraging real time data”
Kevin Gokey, , Global CIO at Church & Dwight
Listen to experts talk about Digital Transformation in CPG Industry – Watch video
Customer Testimonials
Key Analysts Recognitions
ITC Infotech has distinguished itself as an 'Innovator' in Avasant's RadarView™ on Intelligent Automation Services 2020-2021
Avasant evaluated 45 technology service providers across three dimensions: practice maturity, partnership ecosystem, and investments and innovation, as part of this research. Of those 45 providers, Avasant recognized the top 24 companies which delivered the most value to the market during the past 12 months in supporting the enterprise adoption of intelligent automation, in this RadarView™.
“ITC Infotech has identified automation as a key growth lever with several strategic investments in the last 18 months. This has led to a significantly enhanced services portfolio that now includes over 650 industry use cases supported with 300 bots and 440 solution prototypes. Its investment in industry-specific automation CoEs, in addition to a meaningful partnership with Automation Anywhere and UiPath, has yielded encouraging outcomes, and it has led to high client traction,” said Chandrika Dutt, Principal Analyst, Avasant. Read more
“Integrated Planning and Execution” solution Received a notable mention in Forrester’s report titled “Run Your Company On Autopilot - The Rise Of The Autonomous Enterprise”.
The report cites how ITC Infotech’s Smart Trade platform greatly improved customer experience for 2 of the CPG clients. This mention is positioned early in the report on Page 3 in the section covering how autonomous enterprises drive critical business benefits. ITC Infotech has been mentioned alongside companies such as KPMG, SAP, Infor & NTT and platform providers such as Anaplan and Blue Yonder among others.
Other Key Recognitions
- “Strong Performer” in Forrester wave Mid-Size RPA services Q1 2021
- ITC Infotech featured in Gartner Competitive Landscape: Hyperautomation Service Providers 2020
- Positioned in the Leadership zone by Zinnov for CPG& Retail and among top 5 small & medium RPA service providers globally
