Intelligence Amplified - Part 2

If you missed part 1...

First of all, I’ll hold my hands up and admit that this has arrived much later than planned! In part 1 of this blog post I said that I’d follow up in a couple of weeks and that was, well, more than a couple of weeks ago. We got busy and unfortunately this dropped down my list, but I’ve finally blocked out some time to sit down and write the follow up, so here we go!

Intelligence Amplified

In this post I am going to describe how we have started to apply Intelligence Amplified (IA) in some of our recent work.

Rails of Sheffield are one of our original clients and are a global niche online retailer for modellers. Their market is highly specific and to maximise efficiencies and customer retention their stock has to be managed and predicted.

This takes many years of knowing the market, trends, demand and inevitably getting it wrong along the way.

Stock management became a constraint on the business and it could easily go wrong if the person with that knowledge wasn’t around (no holidays for them!). It also limited the number of stock lines that they could carry, as a human brain has its limitations.

This began to affect the business in a number of ways. They were unable to increase the number of product lines and sometimes frustrated their customers as stock couldn’t be guaranteed. As a result, their customers started to go elsewhere.

Stock control was introduced along with product ordering tolerances, alerting and supplier orders. This gave full real time control of the stock and provided visibility of stock predictions - based on constantly updated existing data - taking the manual overhead of ordering away. The effect of applying Intelligence Amplified was twofold. The number of product lines increased 400% and because customers learnt that when the site said that an item was in stock, it actually was, their trust was regained.

Along with the stock control and order alerts, all stock movements, purchase and selling price, ordering from and times, receipt of stock and sale of goods are all tracked to build up a large and highly specific dataset that we are leveraging for analysis and prediction. This data is used to assist in the buying decisions but does not replace the human instinct.

This is a highly effective technique and is providing a significant competitive advantage to our partner.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can apply Intelligence Amplified to your business, give us a shout.