Zeelandia, a global player in the bakery ingredients business, recognised the need to digitally transform its business in order to achieve its goals. Michal Rada, Transformation Leader and Group ICT Director for AI at Zeelandia, provides insight into how the organisation worked with Infor to address challenges such as pricing strategies and how this has led to increased revenues and enhanced customer experience with AI-driven product and pricing recommendations.
Infor, the industry cloud company, has announced that global bakery ingredients business, Zeelandia Group, has deployed its Infor Coleman AI (Artificial Intelligence) solution. These new AI capabilities are improving the accuracy and speed of product selection and pricing strategies and helping to sustain business growth despite ongoing market challenges.
Already deployed at Zeelandia’s facility in the Czech Republic, Infor Coleman AI capabilities will soon be rolled out across the Netherlands, followed by the group’s other worldwide operations. Zeelandia started its Digital Transformation journey with Infor in 2017, moving its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, now live in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The cloud ERP solution provides a modern technology platform, Infor OS, to derive more value through innovations, including the application of Infor Coleman AI.
A global player in the bakery ingredients business with operations in over 30 countries and sales across 100 countries, Zeelandia Group was facing unprecedented market challenges. The higher cost and lack of availability of bakery ingredients required new sales and pricing strategies to maintain long-term customer loyalty while meeting profit goals. Given the group’s broad product portfolio and large customer base, Zeelandia recognised that it needed to digitally transform the organisation to achieve these goals.
Zeelandia worked with Infor to explore the potential of using Infor Coleman AI capabilities to create machine-generated recommendations for products and pricing.
Previously, preparing to meet with customers to analyse what products to recommend was proving time-consuming and error-prone for the Zeelandia sales team due to a manual sales reporting process. Determining the appropriate products for each customer could be a challenge, wasting time for the salesperson and the customer.
Zeelandia worked with the Infor Coleman AI team to implement Infor Product Recommender, a solution that generates the top five products to recommend to customers, ranked by the probability of success. Presented through a web or mobile dashboard using Infor Birst analytics, a salesperson simply selects a customer and product recommendations are then displayed. A salesperson can have up to five customer meetings in one day, so Product Recommender can save them almost a third of a day of prep work.
With AI-driven product recommendations, Zeelandia has achieved these benefits:
- 83% faster time to prepare product recommendations for a customer, from around 30 minutes to five minutes
- Better customer experience with intelligent, personalised product recommendations
- Increased revenue per transaction and share of wallet per customer
- Improved marketing conversion for new products or products that are about to expire
The next challenge Zeelandia addressed with Infor’s help was pricing. With the constant changes in cost and the unavailability of goods, the pricing of products had to be adjusted more frequently. This had been a challenge for Zeelandia as the spreadsheet-driven process for pricing thousands of products for thousands of customers was proving time-consuming and error-prone and was unable to keep pace with the frequency of required price adjustments.
“We have a very complex pricing setup that includes 10,000 individual prices,” said Michal Rada, Transformation Leader and Group ICT Director for AI at Zeelandia. “With the current market fluctuations and uncertainty, it was even more challenging to maintain, so pricing was the next obvious target to see what we could do with Infor using AI and data science to deliver intelligent price recommendations that would find the sweet spot between customer satisfaction and company profits.”
With Infor’s help, Zeelandia applied the same concept of AI recommendations to pricing, delivering the following benefits:
- Improved customer loyalty, offering the right price and understanding why
- Meeting profitability goals with optimal pricing
- Reduced time and costs through machine-generated pricing
“Our goal is to be a trusted partner with bakeries by offering them the right products at the right price so that they, in turn, can keep their customers happy and loyal,” said Rada. “With Infor’s AI-driven recommendations for products and pricing, not only do our salespeople save time in preparing for customer meetings, but Zeelandia stays true to what we value most – customer intimacy.”
The innovation journey continues at Zeelandia with Infor Coleman AI being applied to customer relationship management (CRM) data to provide ‘customer’ or ‘opportunity’ recommendations.
Michal Rada, Transformation Leader and Group ICT Director for AI at Zeelandia, discusses the collaboration with Infor in more detail.
How have the Infor Coleman AI capabilities improved your overall business performance and what notable differences have you seen since commencing the project?
Infor’s platform technology, including Infor Colman AI, has helped us to be more efficient and accurate in our decision-making when targeting the right product at the right price for the right customer. Using Coleman AI to generate product and pricing recommendations for our customers has had a positive business impact in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction and profits.
We are competing with online buying channels for raw bakery ingredients; therefore, it is critical for us to provide the best customer experience. With AI-driven product recommender, salespeople can instantly see the top five products we should be recommending to a customer each time we meet with them because these are the products they are likely to need and buy. Our customers appreciate this personalised, data-driven approach, instead of wasting their time with products that are of no interest to them. Our salespeople love these AI-driven insights because they don’t have to spend hours analysing data and using their intuition to recommend products which could lead to customer churn and revenue loss.
Now, with AI-driven product recommendations, sales and marketing realise the following:
- Improved sales productivity – 83% faster to prepare product recommendations for a customer, from 30 minutes to five minutes
- Better customer experience with intelligent and personalised product recommendations
- Increased revenue per transaction and share of wallet per customer
- Improved marketing conversion for new products or products that are about to expire customers
How does the solution enable you to manage operations seamlessly across your global locations?
We are running our business with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, enabling us to connect and centralise across global locations so that our processes are more consistent, accurate and efficient. Integrating Coleman AI driven insights into the core Infor Cloudsuite ERP is possible with the Infor platform technology embedding insights within ERP screens and Portal so all locations benefit.
Tell us more about Infor Product Recommender and how this benefits your customers?
Both product and pricing recommendations with AI are more accurate; therefore, our customers are more likely to be satisfied and successful when they do business with us. We service the bakery industry so when our customers are getting the right product at the right price, they can then in turn provide the right products at the right price to their customers.
We dared to step out of our comfort zone into the unknown, having courage to consider AI as something we’re – with the help of Infor – capable of integrating into our business processes.
How would you now describe your Digital Transformation journey and what does the future hold?
Zeelandia began its Digital Transformation journey in 2017, moving to a multi-tenant cloud ERP with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage. Live in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we started leveraging the power of Coleman AI last year to improve the accuracy and speed of key business processes that help sustain business growth despite current market challenges.
We plan to be an early adopter of Infor’s hyperautomation solutions to gain more efficiencies.
