PEPSICO TURNS TO ANALYTICS TO PREDICT STOCK-OUTS IN THE U.S.

PepsiCo, the multinational food and beverage company, is transforming its e-commerce and field sales teams with predictive analytics to help it know when a retailer’s stock is about to run out.

The company encountered anomalous signs in the supply chain early in the pandemic, when U.S. consumers began stocking their pantries with commodities amid the blockades that spread around the world. To respond to that problem, PepsiCo turned to analytics and machine learning to predict out-of-stocks and alert retailers to reorder their stock.

“Certain products flew off the shelves for various reasons at the beginning of the pandemic. People wanted to get as much oatmeal as possible. Using some of our intelligence and the technology and the products we built, as the products ran out, we were able to easily turn off the advertising campaigns automatically,” Fertel explains.

Years before the pandemic, Fertel and its engineering organization within PepsiCo eCommerce began working on providing workflow automation to manage search marketing operations. Today, that work has led to the Sales Intelligence Platform, which provides PepsiCo salespeople with information to help them sell the company’s products more effectively. This system combines retailer data with PepsiCo’s supply chain data to predict when an item will run out of stock and prompt users to make purchases to replenish the item.