HOMEGROWN Prince Retail Group has collaborated with Relex Solutions, a market-leading supply chain and retail planning firm, to automate demand forecasting for its more than 70 supermarket stores nationwide.
The company said in a statement that its technological investment will strengthen its position to strategically expand its reach in remote areas across the Philippines.
Stefano Scandelli, an official at Relex Solutions, said that its “collaboration with Prince Retail is a great opportunity to show how Filipino companies can take advantage of automation and AI to realize further growth.”
“We are committed to helping more local retailers digitally transform their supply chains to remain relevant in today’s digital economy,” said Scandelli, senior vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific.
Partnership
Prince Retail and Relex established their partnership at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, during which the access to essentials was crucial.
However, accessing retail channels in rural communities in the Philippines has always been challenging due to regional infrastructure hurdles, according to the company.
Prince Retail said its mission is to close this accessibility gap, adding that the pandemic’s emphasis on the problem only pushed it to finding means to reach and serve more marginalized people.
At the time, Prince Retail said it also faced persistent supply chain challenges that, if not resolved, posed a severe threat to the business’s financial viability.
Demand forecasting was an entirely manual process, leaving teams with significant risks for errors when internal variables and local developments such as lockdowns, shortages of raw materials, or adverse weather conditions occurred, it said.
Maintaining a steady and accurate inventory flow and optimizing operational costs in preparation for expansion was taxing, as almost every Prince Retail store was about 100 kilometers from the nearest port, the company said.
Prince Retail said implementing the Relex unified retail planning solution has enabled it to maximize their resources, streamline operational costs and processes, and improve service levels, even in the most far-flung stores.
The retailer said its forecasting and allocation teams can easily input and view inventory information on a single platform, including intricacies and constraints unique to a specific vendor or store. The result significantly reduces discrepancies brought by disparate, manual forecasting methods, it said.
Powered by AI
The platform, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), automates the complex and time-consuming decisions of calculating forecasts based on user data and harnesses machine learning to optimize predictions.
“Automating our demand forecasting helped us increase our availability by at least 10 percent, enabling us to flourish and deliver a better customer experience despite the uncertainties brought by the pandemic,” shared Rina Janine Go, chief merchandising, marketing and distribution officer at Prince Retail Group of Companies.
“The use of AI greatly supported us to improve our decision-making with data-driven insights that ultimately catalysed our growth and enabled us to serve our customers better than ever before. It helped us seamlessly expand, even with an online channel and other initiatives to reach more customers who were struggling with where to buy their essential necessities,” she added.
In 2021, the corporate group’s subsidiary, Prince Hypermart, partnered with the B2B application “My Suki” to launch an e-commerce app catering to the growing number of digital customers, particularly the large base of resellers who source their goods from Prince. The unified tool for demand forecasting allowed the retailer to seamlessly integrate inventory for both online and offline channels in real time.
Prince Retail said it is one of the organizations that quickly pivoted to digital when the pandemic occurred, advocating digital transformation for other homegrown businesses due to its positive impact on stakeholders.
“Agile digital transformation helped us to streamline our forecasting, better serve our existing customers, and even reach more of the market through our online shopping app — all contributing to the increased confidence and trust in our retail stores,” Go said.
“I believe it’s also equally important to recognize that investing in technological tools that enable us to move away from manual operations increases the digital skills of Filipino workers, which are essential to be future-ready,” Go said. (PR)