USAopoly taps Alloy.ai retail technology as it seeks better visibility into sales and inventory
USAopoly, a specialty game manufacturer, is using Alloy.ai technology to combine sell-through, shipment and forecasting data for more accurate planning, data management time savings and better retail execution – resulting in six figure sales increases at Target and Amazon.
The company claims also to have saved an estimated $240,000 from efficiency gains and $80,000 by reducing excess inventory as a result of using the Alloy.ai platform.
“Having data that is easily accessible and accurate is critical to understanding what’s working and what’s not, knowing what consumers are buying, making accurate forecasts and getting the right products to the right places at the right time,” says Joel Beal, CEO and Co-founder at Alloy.ai.
“That’s where Alloy.ai comes into play, and the benefits that USAopoly has derived from having a single source of truth illustrate how powerful unified and accurate data can be.”
“Alloy.ai fits our needs as we transform into a data-first organisation, and it fits us culturally given how well both of our teams work together,” says USAopoly CFO and COO Tom Nirschl.
USAopoly has created such party and family games as Tapple, Blank Slate and Telestrations as well as themed versions of Clue, Monopoly, Risk and Trivial Pursuit. It sells through retailers such as Amazon, Target and Walmart.
It has used Alloy.ai to reveal that a sales decline with a major US retailer was due to said retailer running significantly fewer promotions on USAopoly products than they had run the previous year.
USAopoly was able to bring this data to the retailer in order to illustrate the root cause of sales declines and strengthen its partnership with the retailer.
In another instance, it employed Alloy.ai to learn that Amazon was ordering product at below the level of true consumer demand, and the retailer corrected the issue when presented with the findings.
Amazon had used historical sales that didn’t account for out-of-stocks from last year to order Blank Slate and other products, not accounting for the fact that the lower sales were actually a function of out-of-stocks.
When presented with proof of the recent sales velocity in Alloy.ai, Amazon responded by placing an out-of-cadence manual order with USAopoly that was incrementally valued at $412,000.
“The typical process of working with data involves spending about 80% of your time preparing the data and just 20% of your time doing the actual data analysis. For example, every week my team used to dedicate about six hours pulling Point of Sale data from all of our retailers and feeding it into a template for forecasting,” says Eric Richardson, Manager of Forecasting and Data Analytics at USAopoly.
“But now Alloy.ai handles most of that upfront data preparation, so we avoid any potential user error involved with data preparation, our costs are lower, and my team and I can spend a lot more time analysing data and making business decisions based on that analysis.”
USAopoly has now adopted Alloy.ai’s technology across its organisation. The marketing team uses it to see immediate sell-through and gauge the value and impact of their digital and print campaigns.
Finance employs it to get visibility into what’s in the pipeline and to understand whether Point of Sale data is supporting USAopoly’s revenue goals for the year.
Meanwhile, Alloy.ai provides the company’s purchasing team with more tangible visibility into what’s actually happening in the marketplace so that the members of this team can purchase with confidence, with the correct lead times, and know that data supports these decisions.
“Alloy.ai is our preferred partner for demand forecasting, sales and inventory data aggregation and building reports based on what’s happening at the Point of Sale,” says Richardson.
“Alloy.ai’s impressive solution allows us to connect directly with our retailers and obtain a unified source of accurate data, and the company’s meticulous attention to detail and personalised approach convinced us that Alloy.ai was the right choice.”
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