church & dwightwhich manufactures brands such as Arm & Hammer, Zicam, Trojan, and Hero, has increased inventory visibility as part of an effort to improve decision-making in its merchandising operations.
As part of these efforts, the company has partnered with the following companies: Store site In 2023, we plan to gain more insights to help us recover lost sales, optimize product placement, and strengthen key retail relationships with Walmart and Target.
Since then, the tool has helped capture visual evidence of competitor activity, price differences, and SKU fluctuations.
One of the key challenges Church & Dwight sought to solve was around phantom inventory, or products that are not actually on store shelves but appear incorrectly in the company’s inventory system.
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Now, AI-enabled technology Church & Dwight’s ability to collect real-time photos allows it to identify inventory gaps on shelves and address discrepancies with retailers.
“Thanks to the photos on our store site that showed holes in the shelves…we were able to prove that our inventory was overstated,” Amy Maloney, senior national account manager, said in a statement.
Furthermore, she added: “We found a number of stores that hadn’t sold a single item in four weeks. We were able to say, ‘Look, the data shows that the store isn’t selling, and we’re also looking at photos that show there are no items on the shelves.’ We manually scripted the replenishment orders…and that was a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar order.”
