Announcing Connected Planning and Execution from Alloy

Today marks a very important step forward toward Alloy’s vision as we announce the release of our Connected Planning & Execution platform. We started Alloy six years ago to help consumer goods brands more quickly and efficiently respond to ever-changing consumer demand. At the time, supply chains were often afterthoughts. A lot has changed.

The complexity and challenges of aligning supply and demand are now everyday news. Consumer behavior–already shifting due to eCommerce — faced a major COVID shock, and logistics and manufacturing have been struggling to catch up ever since. Most of our supply chain infrastructure — both physical and digital — was built for a “steady state” world where relatively little changes week to week, or even year-to-year.

But new challenges bring new opportunities. That’s why here at Alloy we’ve built the first Connected Planning and Execution platform for consumer brands. To put it simply, Alloy connects data from all of your retailers, ecommerce, distributors, 3PLs and ERP on a single intuitive platform — for better and faster supply chain and planning decisions.

Planning and execution together on one platform — for the first time

It’s our belief that combining planning and analysis-driven execution on a single platform makes both far more powerful. It allows you to plan faster and more accurately, and to react more quickly to changes at the shelf or the supplier.

• A first major benefit is reducing guesswork. By incorporating real-time consumer demand signals and up-to-date inventory status, you can make better-informed decisions faster. And predictive forecasting capabilities let you get ahead of potential issues before they cost your business.
• Second is breaking down the silos between data and teams that plague consumer goods companies of all sizes. Connected Planning & Execution lets you build trust by aligning inventory planning, demand planning, sales, marketing, finance and operations teams around a single source of information, on a single intuitive platform.
• A third, but by no means final benefit, is that now you can more easily identify which anomalies will have the biggest impact and take action to correct them. Your plan will always diverge from your reality — the question is by how much? Alloy lets brands identify and resolve the exceptions that will make the biggest impact so they can focus attention and take on action on what matters most.

Of course, all this is easy to say and hard to do. From our earliest days, the bulk of our focus at Alloy has been developing a data platform, purpose-built for consumer goods brands. The data platform connects your sell-through data from retail and ecommerce with your internal inventory and supply chain data from your ERP — then continuously pulls and harmonizes the data in real-time.

On top of this platform sits our Planning and Intelligence products. Alloy Planning relies on POS-driven forecasts to help brands plan their demand and inventory levels. And Alloy Intelligence identifies sales opportunities and inventory risks across your distribution network.

We are fortunate to be trusted by amazing brands including Ferrero, Valvoline, Bosch and Melissa & Doug. We’ve helped our customers see 5% bottom line impacts, reduce out-of-stocks during product launches, and be able to initiate millions of dollars in incremental orders.

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and see for yourself today.