Solving the imbalance

“It was a very simple conversation,” says Morton of his first interaction with Atheon Analytics. “I just laid it all out: we had one demand planner doing all of our UK forecasts, around 200 customers to manage, and a business that was - at that point - just nudging up to a quarter of a billion pounds in sales. Right away, it was obvious that they knew the kind of challenge that we were facing.”

Equally obvious, he says, was the value that SKUtrak could bring to Alpro - and how quickly it might do so: “I was a little bit amazed that a product like this was available, to be honest. The level of detail that we could get to with it, the range of reports we could create. From moment one, I knew it was exactly what we needed."

Branching out

Other successes soon followed. Better insight into on-shelf availability provided Alpro with a greater understanding of lost sales, for instance, and Morton points to significant service level improvements as a result of the company’s enhanced awareness of its distribution performance. As word spread however, it also became clear that SKUtrak had relevance beyond just the operations team.

“Just as it surprised me, I think that SKUtrak surprised other people around our business as well,” Morton continues. “It held obvious value for our Category team in terms of range reviews, for example. Then, our Planning and Revenue Growth Management (PRGM) team adopted it for the purpose of promotional analysis too. It started as a self-contained thing, but very quickly snowballed across the business.”

Some professional training from Atheon’s Customer Success team gave some extra momentum. “Suddenly, we had another set of insights to work with,” says Morton. “Looking at our promotions, for instance, we were able to see the level of uplift based on the ingredients we used, or the retailer we were running with. SKUtrak gave us the ability to understand cannibalisation across other categories, as well.”

What resulted from those insights was a smarter - and more agile - approach to promotional planning, according to Morton. “Say we introduced a new promotional mechanic,” he says. “Within a short period of time, we’d be able to understand how that was performing compared to previous approaches, and modify our strategy accordingly. SKUtrak helped us become more effective from a sales perspective, as well as an operational one.”

As 2020 dawned, all was going well - until it wasn’t. But as the Covid pandemic began to spread, SKUtrak had yet more value to add as Alpro adjusted to its new reality.

Unprecedented uncertainty

Like any CPG business, Alpro’s circumstances changed dramatically in the wake of Covid. Supply was disrupted, demand spiked, and the company found itself faced with tough decisions about how to get enough of the right products to the right places.

“Almost overnight, two things became more important than ever,” says Morton. “We needed to know our stockholding position with complete certainty, and we needed a real-time view of EPOS data by SKU and by store - or at least as close to real-time as we could feasibly get. Those data points were going to be absolutely key if we wanted to provide everyone with an acceptable level of service.”

Thanks to the years of groundwork that Alpro had already put in with SKUtrak, those data points were also immediately accessible - something that Morton credits with helping guide the company through that prolonged period of turbulence.