COVID-19 has certainly changed many things. Countries, businesses and individuals are adopting distinct measures and experimenting with their approaches to survive the crisis. An example of this would be a French luxury perfume behemoth that pivoted to producing hand sanitizers in a bid to help the country fight the pandemic. The outbreak has uprooted normalcy. With changed circumstances, a variation in demand-supply, consumer preferences, and rate of consumption of consumer packaged goods (CPG) can be observed. Manufacturers are assessing how to address supply chain disruptions and capacity limitations that may prevent them from meeting changing consumer requirements in terms of what people buy, where they buy, how they buy, in what quantity, and how often.
It is forcing CPG companies to rethink strategies and capabilities related to all things business – be it manufacturing, logistics, pricing, customer engagement or commerce.
Managing demand and supply chain
AI can act in two ways: It can foresee product demand and quantities, and prompt the manufacturers. They can then choose to produce a certain commodity in that quantity, taking also into account the increased tendency of panic buying and stockpiling due to the pandemic, or halt the production of a certain product, temporarily. This will help companies meet the ever-growing demand for products, such as sanitizers, and also alleviate the stress on available resources by temporarily halting the production of non-essential items.
