Challenge
Gold Medal Bakery, a leading provider of private-label and branded bakery products, faced severe competition from an ever-increasing variety of branded products. They were experiencing a significant number of out of stocks and felt they were less flexible than their competitors. Further complicated by the pressure to reduce product waste, the challenge Gold Medal Bakery faced was to improve their demand forecasting ability while maintaining a high level of service for their retail customers. Given increased intensity in the consumer-intimate environment, the organization needed to create a world-class sales force to drive business performance.

Solution
Based on deep industry knowledge in this area, Clarkston Consulting chose to combine a SMARTselling application with supply and demand chain optimization best practices in order to provide an innovative solution that would enable the forecasting and integration of data needed for Gold Medal Bakery’s success. Eleven Technology’s SMARTselling web-based application suite for handhelds was integrated into the current SAP® enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This sales tool scans sales, promotional activity, seasonality, sales trends, and all market specific information in real-time at the retailer thus creating a ‘Smart’ order. The application suggests ‘Smart” orders on a per-customer, per SKU basis, and transmits those orders in real-time to Gold Medal Bakery’s ERP system.

Benefits
The solution resulted in field sales’ enhanced ability to improve customer and consumer service by providing the framework to capture valuable data from the “moment of truth.” Gold Medal Bakery has become adept at forecasting customer demand based on the integration of sales history, POS data, and seasonal promotions. Now, Gold Medal Bakery’s sales force is able to focus on revenue generating activities, like direct selling in high traffic stores and educating retail personnel.

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