Kimberly-Clark Leverages Big Data in China
Kimberly-Clark China (KCC) works with Retail Solutions Inc. (RSi) to improve product availability, uncover new business opportunities and drive sales at Walmart stores throughout China. The personal care and paper-based consumer products giant uses Retail Solutions Inc. to track product sales and inventory in near real time — boosting sales, lowering costs across the supply chain and improving customer satisfaction.
"With a reduced field operations staff and growing pressure to do more with less, we needed a low risk, high-reward solution that could find and fix execution-level problems and identify untapped opportunities to drive sales," says Patrick Xie, Key Account leader at KCC responsible for the Wal-Mart relationship. "RSi alerts have become an invaluable tool to the day-to-day operations of our business. The system does all the heavy lifting, accurately analyzing huge data sets to discover errors and oversights that can be quickly corrected - ensuring the sale and stock of each product, in every store, every day is optimized."
With three product categories — Feminine Care, Child Care and Family Care — and more than 300 SKUs, across 400 Walmart stores, a single day's point-of-sale (POS) data can easily go beyond 100,000 records. The POS data, coupled with operational data like store inventory, purchase order and shipment information, puts the total number of new data points generated on a daily basis to more than a million records.
RSi helps to provide KCC with a real-time view of sales and inventory across channels and accurate insight into what was actually occurring at the store level, including distribution flaws, out-of-stocks and promotional errors. Since actively deploying RSi and executing the new processes in Walmart stores throughout China, KCC was able to quickly recoup losses experienced in the first quarter of 2012. The company went on to exceed its sales quota for the year and was named "Best Vendor of Walmart China" at the 2013 Walmart Year Beginning Meeting.
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"With a reduced field operations staff and growing pressure to do more with less, we needed a low risk, high-reward solution that could find and fix execution-level problems and identify untapped opportunities to drive sales," says Patrick Xie, Key Account leader at KCC responsible for the Wal-Mart relationship. "RSi alerts have become an invaluable tool to the day-to-day operations of our business. The system does all the heavy lifting, accurately analyzing huge data sets to discover errors and oversights that can be quickly corrected - ensuring the sale and stock of each product, in every store, every day is optimized."
With three product categories — Feminine Care, Child Care and Family Care — and more than 300 SKUs, across 400 Walmart stores, a single day's point-of-sale (POS) data can easily go beyond 100,000 records. The POS data, coupled with operational data like store inventory, purchase order and shipment information, puts the total number of new data points generated on a daily basis to more than a million records.
RSi helps to provide KCC with a real-time view of sales and inventory across channels and accurate insight into what was actually occurring at the store level, including distribution flaws, out-of-stocks and promotional errors. Since actively deploying RSi and executing the new processes in Walmart stores throughout China, KCC was able to quickly recoup losses experienced in the first quarter of 2012. The company went on to exceed its sales quota for the year and was named "Best Vendor of Walmart China" at the 2013 Walmart Year Beginning Meeting.
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