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Session1 - Problem Statement - ID Fresh Food

iD Fresh Foods is focused on improving demand forecasting for its perishable products with a short shelf life of about 7 days. Sujeeth Ravindran, the new Head of IT, aims to create a more predictive organization by utilizing data to optimize production quantities and enhance SKU velocity. The goal is to guide the sales force on daily stock placements to reduce stock-outs and ensure efficient distribution to retail stores.

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84 views1 page

Session1 - Problem Statement - ID Fresh Food

iD Fresh Foods is focused on improving demand forecasting for its perishable products with a short shelf life of about 7 days. Sujeeth Ravindran, the new Head of IT, aims to create a more predictive organization by utilizing data to optimize production quantities and enhance SKU velocity. The goal is to guide the sales force on daily stock placements to reduce stock-outs and ensure efficient distribution to retail stores.

Uploaded by

alvinshah022
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Demand Forecasting for Perishable Short Shelf-Life Homemade Food at iD Fresh Food

“We are only professional assistants to the homemaker. Our products will always be ready to cook,
not ready to eat. So, they don’t reach the dining table; they first go into the kitchen. If the Idli is
good, the homemaker get the credit; if the Idli turns out bad, iD takes credit”
— PC Mustafa, CEO, iD Fresh Foods

Sujeeth Ravindran had recently taken over as the Head of Information Technology at iD Fresh Food,
after helping to expand the company’s business in Mumbai and Pune. As a childhood friend of PC
Mustafa, founder and CEO of iD fresh foods, Sujeeth went on to sell software after graduation for
several years before joining iD to help expand the company’s operations in Mumbai and Pune. Three
months prior to our meeting in 2015, he had taken up the responsibility of establishing strong IT
systems and processes at iD. Predicting demand for products was one of the challenges faced by iD
Fresh, since the products sold by them had short shelf life of about 7 days.

Sujeeth started the meeting with the following statement:

Right now, what we do within iD is to run the entire production to distribution ourselves. We pretty
much run the entire operations ourselves. Our production-to-distribution to store fronts time window
is about 24 hours. We are trying to see how we could get into a more predictive organization. Unlike
the challenges that other FMCG players may have, we believe we have lot more data points using
which we can make our organization lot more predictive and responsive than what we are currently
doing. Which is why, this exercise has become lot more interesting and focused for us now.

Fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) are products that are sold quickly in large number and at
relatively low cost. They have a short shelf life, either because of high consumer demand or because
the product deteriorates rapidly. FMCG is a classic case of low margin and high-volume business that
can result in high cumulative profit. From a consumer perspective, the main characteristics of FMCG
include frequent purchase, low involvement (i.e., little or no effort by customer to choose the item),
relatively low price, short shelf life, and rapid consumption². Sujeeth said:

This project has become strategically important to us and we are very focused on the outcome. The
basic question to be resolved is to ensure an optimum production quantity such that we can serve
our retail stores daily and increase our SKU velocity. This way, we would be in a situation where sales
force would be guided on how much to place on the store shelves daily, ensure daily store visits and
reduce stock-outs.

SKU = Stock-keeping unit (like Idly batter, Dosa batter, Parotas, Chapatis etc.)

Beat = Route (like Bandra, Juhu, Marol, Borivili etc.)

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