Store locator bot

  • Home
  • Store locator bot

Demand as transportation services as commerce

surface transport & logistics

alt test

For one leading pharmaceutical laboratory, success and double-digit sales growth came with a cost: an overburdened supply chain that threatened to reduce market share.

The effort vastly improved the company’s planning and execution functions, they knew that in order to succeed in this era of technology their accounting systems needed to be much more robust than what they are. They turned to WP consulting to improve their accounting systems.

The effort vastly improved the company’s planning and execution functions, they knew that in order to succeed in this era of technology their accounting systems needed to be much more robust than what they are. They turned to WP consulting to improve their accounting systems.

challenge

The biggest challenge was that Arguzo was not utilizing technology properly. Too much of the work was still being recorded manually, which meant that the numbers took a long time to note down and then to be analyzed. Live data was also not available and decisions can only be made after all the required data and been received. This was holding Arguzo back; they knew they could corner more of the market if they had the ability to be more mobile. The work addressed three critical issues for Pharm Ltd.:

  • Improve sales and operations and production planning:
    The teams focused their efforts on a few of the highest-value S&OP levers in order to review the current planning process, identify gaps in the planning infrastructure and analytically understand demand and supply variability.
  • Determine the right inventory level:
    With hundreds of medications in the market, Pharm Ltd. needed a proper method to predict and manage their inventory. Using a mean absolute percentage analysis (MAPE), the teams defined appropriate levels for raw materials and finished products by mapping actual versus forecasted sales on the most important SKUs.
  • Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning:
    The diagnostic determined the stressors that affected sales and service levels. The teams focused on resolving issues related to higher-than-normal back-orders and lead times, which stressed the entire supply chain and led to delays in medications reaching consumers.

solution

The solution WP consulting came up with combined cutting edge technology with real world practicality. Everyone knew that the systems had to be updated, the real challenge was updating them without disrupting the whole organization in a negative way. The solution was to introduce proper workload management done through computers, while providing mobile platforms to the stakeholders.

This allowed the workers to be involved in the job instead of feeling like they had been made redundant by technology.

results

Arguzo employees are now more empowered; Arguzo also has the benefit of generating reports instantaneously whenever needed. They can now make decisions on the fly based on the latest real time data.

The effort vastly improved the company’s planning and execution functions, created and implemented a new stock policy that accounted for specific SKUs and key variables, streamlined the order preparation process and reduced distribution transport times.

By the numbers, the effort:

  • Reduced lead time by 43%
  • Decreased variability by 50%
  • Lowered the risk of back-order by 95%
  • Increased stock for finished goods by 10%

Problem Statement

During the Covid-19 pandemic how will one know if stocks are available at a nearby retail store. As we all might have experienced that before or during the lock-down a few individuals purchased a lot of items in bulk and for oneself and family without considering the risk of stocks not being available to the rest. Also, to ensure each of us stay home and not go out every now and then to the stores we purchases groceries for a week or so. This also impacted some stores and individuals.

Introduction

As we all know even during the lock-down most of the FMCG companies had to work and ensure all the essentials commodities are available for the general public. Our client being one of the leading ones in the FMCG industry decided to take a step to spread awareness on where they are shipping there stocks and which nearby store has recently been stocked.

Solution

As our client is connected with lakhs of retail stores across PAN India the client came up with a solution to bring in a Chatbot on to WhatsApp which would help users with the information. A user can go to the Clients WhatsApp bot and ask for stores near me. The bot would ask for two things one is Name and then the current location of the users.

Once the user provides the current location information to the bot, it will get a list of 5 nearby stores which were recently be stocked with. The user would be provided with three details Name of Store, Phone Number, Directions. This would help any individual to easily find the store and get the required essentials.

Approach

The best was to do this was to first ensure we have the accurate details of the retailers, the involves name, number and location information. Once this was validated and the data was cleaned up then we moved ahead to mode of communication as users would not want to access these chatbot much over a website or any other application and hence it was decided that we would go ahead with WhatsApp which the client was already using to run a few campaigns for their retailers.

After this the main thing was the conversation design as we needed to make it as simple and easy with minimal steps. To do this we decided that we will mainly ask the user for their current location and once this has been provided we will extract the latitude and longitude information from it and shortlist the retail stores based on 10 KM radius from the users current location.

Now that this logic was decided and evaluated we were all set to start the development of the chatbot using Dialogflow platform. The ease of use of this platform allowed us to complete the development of the chatbot in a short duration of time and now that the UAT was also completed we went live in a few days time.

Benefits

  • LOCATING STORES:

Store locator makes searching the nearest location of store very convenient and easy. Instead of searching on the internet. Customer can now provide their location and get the list of nearest stores in an instant.

  • ON THE GO ASSISTANCE:

Store locator bot can assist customer 24/7. Store locator can provide services to the users without break and with same efficiency. This would enhance customer service and helps user also save their time.

  • CONVENIENT AND HASSLE FREE:

Locating stores through bot is very convenient and saves lot of time without going through much of hassle. The distribution network is most important for any company and the store locator helps in this too.