Future Group announces strategic partnership with analytics firm Manthan

Rakesh Biyani, Joint Managing Director at India’s largest retailer Future Group, along with Atul Jalan, CEO Manthan, a renowned player in analytics for the consumer industry, announced breakthrough results of their 10 month old partnership in analytics-driven business transformation.

In an effort to fuel its next level of growth, Future Group aimed at acquiring the abilities to look at customer opportunities at a deep and granular level. Additionally, the Group desired the flexibility to act on these opportunities near real time, on any channel, on any product, and at any store.

Nationwide diversity and the uniqueness of the Indian consumer posed challenges for Future Group in understanding these opportunities and how they varied across markets and stores. Further, the fast changing consumer behavior and pace of business expansion made consistent execution challenging.

“Customer-centric execution is key to our growth. We needed new technologies to develop new competencies and change our game”, said Joint MD at Future Retail, Rakesh Biyani.

“We knew every customer need was unique and we had opportunities to fine-tune our business planning and execution. With the hyper-localized views of customer demand that Manthan’s analytics provides, we will be able to tailor assortments, inventory, replenishment, marketing promotions, store engagement to meet the unique needs of markets and stores. By making decisions faster and more precise, and our execution more efficient, we believe it has the potential to realize a 7-9% reduction in out of stocks, recover an average 5-7% in lost sales, and achieve 10-12% reduction in churn. All of this would not be possible without the ability to spot and act on analytics-driven opportunities” added Rakesh Biyani.

From the past 4 months Future Group has engaged Manthan’s capabilities for driving decision making in many areas of its business. “We are seeing early signs of promising results from analytics based business initiatives.”

Group CIO at Future Retail, Manoj Agarwal added, “Earlier, such sophisticated analysis would take a long time to deliver, but with Manthan, it is available out of the box in the hands of decision makers. Data which was available only to a few, is now available across the organisation, designed uniquely for each role, and available at their fingertips. This helps us in empowering stores, marketers, merchants with data driven decision making in the areas of assortment planning, event planning, personalized communication and many more. All of this, takes our customer engagement to the next level.”

In a short span, Manthan has deployed its entire portfolio of analytics solutions in key store brands of the retail conglomerate, impacting most aspects of Future Group’s business, including marketing, merchandising, supply chain, stores and digital commerce.

Manthan’s analytics track more than 10 million customer transactions in a month, from over 13000 product brands and 3000 suppliers, giving Future Group precise, real-time, and actionable information in over 370 stores across 166 cities nationwide. Activities of over 25 million loyal customers and their transactions are tracked in Manthan’s data warehouse. Future Group is currently rolling out analytics to all decision makers across its business divisions.

“Making analytics-driven competencies a reality is a tremendous opportunity for Indian retailers today. Future Group has a head start in this direction, and some of the business results we are seeing in this partnership are simply outstanding. Manthan’s 12-year endeavour has been focused on simplifying the sophisticated technologies and statistical sciences needed in understanding customer behavior and realizing its potential in easy-to-use, business friendly analytical applications,” said Atul Jalan, CEO at Manthan.

Jalan further siad, “I call this the ‘consumerization of analytics’, and without giving analytics technologies this edge, it’s difficult to realize its full potential. Over 200 satisfied customers worldwide share similar stories on the impact of our award-winning products in their business. I believe the Indian retail market is maturing into its next age of competitiveness and such technologies will play a transformative role.”

Designed to understand retail business roles and contexts, Manthan products offered the Future Group quick speed to value on its data-driven decision making needs. Manthan was recently mentioned by Gartner for providing the most comprehensive range of analytics solutions in retail. Gartner also featured Manthan’s work with Future Group in a recent research report.

Some of the analytics products from Manthan the Future Group uses are:

• Merchandise Analytics for store merchandise assortment planning, replenishment and pricing
• Vendor Link for supply process visibility and supplier collaboration
• Customer360 for behavioral segmentation and targeted marketing
• E-commerce Analytics to identify path to purchase and channel contribution
• GPS and 3rdi for guided analytics and decision execution

Over the next 12 months, Manthan will partner with Future Group to create the necessary ground for projects that drive analytics and information based innovation. These include business advisory services, center of excellence, innovation labs for co-creation of applications. Future Group intends to roll out analytics to more associates across the group, for example, empowering store level decision makers with mobile clienteling and assisted customer engagement applications.

On an affirmative note, Rakesh Biyani stated, “In an evolving consumer market like India, Manthan has successfully applied their advanced analytical products to help us stay ahead of the trends that will shape tomorrow’s Indian retail space.”