Global supply chain challenges created by the pandemic are now amplified by the conflict in Ukraine, contributing to inflation and soaring prices for agricultural raw materials. Ukraine and Russia are the suppliers of 30% of the world’s wheat and barley exports. Now, the war has created uncertainty for exporting grain, wheat, and vegetable oil.
Zeelandia Group, a global player in the bakery ingredients business, is feeling the pain of this uncertainty across their operations in over 30 countries and sales in about 100 countries. Their business is focused on repeated sales to long-term customers; therefore, it is critical for Zeelandia to strengthen their relationship with customers and differentiate to negate alternative buying channels.
Fortunately, Zeelandia is agile having begun its digital transformation journey in 2017 with Infor to move their ERP to the cloud with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage. Live with the cloud ERP in Czechia and Slovakia, Zeelandia is leveraging the power of Infor’s integrated platform technology to improve the accuracy and speed of key business processes that help sustain business growth despite current market challenges.
Digitization allows Zeelandia to explore the wealth of data in systems to improve the business and better serve customers. CloudSuite is where Zeelandia sales orders are processed and automatically pushed into the Infor Data Lake. Using integrated Infor Coleman AI services, Zeelandia is able to augment more accurate recommendations for products and pricing. These recommendations save time for sales and marketing teams, and bring modernization and personalization to the customer experience, keeping customers loyal and happy.
Zeelandia implemented Product Recommender using Coleman AI to quickly generate intelligent product recommendations to customers. Prior to Coleman AI, it was a manual reporting process to determine selling opportunities. Zeelandia has a very large product portfolio making it difficult to make personalized product recommendations for each customer. If the salesperson was new or time constrained, offering the most appropriate product is a challenge, potentially wasting everyone’s time.
Assisting Zeelandia’s efficiency, Product Recommender generates the top five products to recommend to customers, ranked by the probability of success. Presented through a web or mobile dashboard using democratized analytics infused with artificial intelligence from Infor Birst, a salesperson simply selects a customer and recommendations are displayed. A salesperson can schedule up to five customer meetings in one day, so Product Recommender can save them almost a third of a day of prep work.
Now, with AI-driven product recommendations, sales and marketing realize the following benefits:
- Elevated speed: 83% faster to prepare product recommendations for a customer, from 30 minutes to 5 minutes
- Better customer experience with intelligent and personalized product recommendations
- Increased revenue per transaction and share of wallet per customer
- Improved marketing conversion for new products or products that are about to expire
- Product Recommender deployed in under 90 days
After making the product recommendations, pricing the products is the next step. With the constant change in cost and unavailability of goods, pricing of products must be adjusted more frequently. This has been a challenge for Zeelandia as they used a spreadsheet-driven process for pricing thousands products to thousands of customers. It is a time-consuming and error-prone process, and no longer scalable with the need to frequently adjust pricing.
Pricing Recommender generates the optimal pricing for a product by customer. Embedded within CloudSuite sales order screen, the recommended price is displayed with the quantity, price per unit, and discount. Past transactions are also visible, enabling the salesperson to make the best pricing decision.
Now, with AI driven optimal pricing recommendations, the following benefits are realized:
- Improve customer loyalty, with sales offering the right price and explain why
- Meet profitability goals with optimal pricing
- Reduce time and costs through machine generated pricing
Learn more about Infor Coleman AI capabilities: https://www.infor.com/en-gb/products/coleman
Infor URI:
https://technology-blog.infor.com/2022/08/09/zeelandia-increases-revenues-and-enhances-customer-experience-with-ai-driven-product-and-pricing-recommendations/