2013 Readers' Choice: Editors' Picks
22 More Unique Technology Providers to Explore in 2013
Each year, CGT’s editorial staff calls attention to more than 20 additional solution and service providers that are poised to make a substantial impact on the consumer goods market with innovative yet necessary tools. These companies — some new and some familiar — often don’t fit snugly into CGT’s Readers’ Choice Survey categories due to their smaller size or the niche focus of their software and/or services. Nonetheless, they have been strongly endorsed to our editorial team by consumer goods executives in conversations throughout the year and deserve to be recognized for their contributions to the industry.
Download the full Editors' Picks Report
1WorldSync
www.1worldsync.com
Specialty: 1WorldSync helps consumer goods companies of all sizes source, cleanse, maintain, and exchange product information with their trading partners.
Big Win in 2012: 1SYNC and SA2 Worldsync joined companies to create 1WorldSync, a global leader in data synchronization and product data management.
AMG Strategic Advisors
www.acosta.com/amg
Specialty: Strategic Consulting and Insights Firm leveraging Acosta’s comprehensive data sets, extensive retail presence and cross-category vantage point to create growth strategies based on proprietary consumer, shopper and category insights.
Big Win in 2012: Segmentation and shopper insights led to leadership platform and assortment/shelving recommendations that drove incremental retailer distribution, sales and profit.
BT
www.globalservices.bt.com/us
Specialty: BT is a global leader in networked IT services, consulting, managed services, and full outsourcing for business and IT transformation, helping consumer packaged goods companies effectively use technology to grow and globalize in innovative and sustainable ways.
Big Win in 2012: British American Tobacco (BAT) selected BT to manage its global wide area network infrastructure, including remote access, network security and third-party supplier management across nearly 1,000 sites in 119 countries.
Buzz Solutions
www.buzzsolutions.com
Specialty: Buzz Retail is a retail execution solution for the consumer goods industry. Cloud-based and mobile (online and offline), the application supports both comprehensive field sales management as well as field execution to drive targeted activities. Buzz Retail is built on Force.com, a leading cloud platform.
Big Win in 2012: Buzz Solutions executed a 17-country deployment at one of the largest consumer pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Eastman Kodak Company
www.Kodak.com/go/brandprotection
Specialty: Kodak Brand Protection Solutions help brand owners in cosmetics, pharmaceutical, luxury goods and wine/spirits companies to address and counteract fraud and counterfeiting for packaged goods, utilizing authentication and track and trace technology.
Big Win in 2012: Kodak TRACELESS Color CIJ System incorporates highly stable, invisible authentication markers within continuous inkjet systems, allowing variable printing of visible data for easy authentication.
Exceedra
www.exceedra.com
Specialty: Exceedra’s modular planning and insight solutions are increasingly recognized as meeting the needs of both today’s and tomorrow’s consumer goods companies in areas of integrated business planning, trade promotion management and demand signal repositories, providing highly intuitive, best-of-breed functionality.
Big Win in 2012: Bayer Consumer Healthcare UK is the latest company to recognize Exceedra as the one-stop solution for planning and insight for the consumer goods sector.
Genpact
www.genpact.com
Specialty: Genpact, a business process management and technology services provider, leverages the power of smarter processes, analytics and technology to help consumer goods industry clients operate as an intelligent enterprise, making them more effective and competitive.
Big Win in 2012: Genpact continues to provide business process management services to industry-leading clients, including Kimberly-Clark, where the relationship expanded in F&A, trade promotion optimization and high-end analytics during 2012.
GT Nexus
www.gtnexus.com
Specialty: GT Nexus provides the cloud-based collaboration platform that leaders in nearly every sector rely on to automate hundreds of supply chain processes on a global scale, across entire trade communities.
Big Win in 2012: The collective value of inventory being managed by customers on the GT Nexus platform surpassed $100 billion.
Inspirage
www.Inspirage.com
Specialty: Inspirage is a global consulting firm that specializes in value chain planning and execution. It provides an advantage to consumer goods companies by deploying integrated business processes, including predictive trade management. Inspirage also delivers cloud services with its Value Chain Plus offering.
Big Win in 2012: Inspirage was selected as a co-development partner with Oracle for Oracle Fusion Value Chain Planning applications.
Kalido
www.kalido.com
Specialty: Kalido’s technology enables consumer packaged goods organizations to create an agile data foundation for analytics and reporting that sharpens business insights in dynamic markets.
Big Win in 2012: Kalido continues to help global brands such as Anheuser-Busch InBev gain insight into their customer base and identify new business opportunities.
Kony
www.kony.com
Specialty: Kony develops a suite of customizable pre-built apps, the KonyOne Platform and a comprehensive mobile application management solution across all mobile devices and operating systems.
Big Win in 2012: Kony was named a “Visionary” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADP) report.
Mindtree
www.mindtree.com
Specialty: Mindtree partners with global consumer packaged goods enterprises, including four of the top 10, in delivering superior IT solutions. Solutions help customers improve collaboration with their partner ecosystem and bring them closer to end consumers.
Big Win in 2012: A large sports major selected Mindtree to build a next generation marketing excellence platform to harmonize the marketing operations processes and reduce concept to shelf cycle.
SCA Technologies
www.scatech.com
Specialty: SCA Technologies is a cloud-based provider of solutions that help companies make more profitable decisions on direct materials spend. The SCAplatform uniquely connects the supply chain and finance organizations to orchestrate alternatives and improve corporate performance.
Big Win in 2012: SCA is launching a new optimization solution that will allow customers to model supply chain alternatives and enable more profitable decision making.
SetSight
www.setsight.com
Specialty: SetSight provides cloud-based tools to consumer goods suppliers that assist in the collection and analysis of downstream sales, supply chain and category-level retail data.
Big Win in 2012: General Mills’ Sales Systems Team selected SetSight to provide push button and custom solutions to a group of GMI sales teams spanning multiple retailers and channels.
SEQUOYA
www.sequoya.com
Specialty: Sequoya deploys hosted predictive modeling technology embedded in a business application suite to optimize everyday price and trade promotions for all client brands as well as the category.
Big Win in 2012: Net new customer implementations span Mexico, Colombia, Thailand, Canada in addition to the United States in 2012.
Sparta Systems, Inc.
www.spartasystems.com
Specialty: Sparta Systems’ enterprise quality management solutions (EQMS) enable organizations to safely and efficiently deliver products and services to market. Its TrackWise Enterprise Quality Management Software, a trusted standard among highly regulated industries, reduces risk and improves safety across the global enterprise.
Big Win in 2012: Sparta Systems had wins at some of the top global consumer goods companies, and was named the “2012 Software Company of the Year” by the New Jersey Technology Council.
Spring Mobile Solutions
www.springmobilesolutions.com
Specialty: Spring Mobile Solutions has been providing end-to-end mobility solutions designed to enable organizations to increase productivity and optimize real-time processes and operations to leading world brands for more than 10 years.
Big Win in 2012: Spring’s customer, Unilever, more than doubled its usage in 2012 to automate processes to more than two billion customers worldwide.
TAKE Solutions
www.takesolutions.com/scm
Specialty: TAKE Solutions is a global provider of supply chain solutions that help companies extend and accelerate the time to value of their technology investments.
Big Win in 2012: TAKE continued to enhance its supply chain collaboration technology and was honored as a Top 500 Software and Services provider by Software Magazine as well as a 2012 SupplyChainBrain Great Supply Chain Partner.
ToolsGroup
www.toolsgroup.com
Specialty: ToolsGroup “Powerfully Simple” SCP improves and automates demand forecasting, S&OP, demand sensing and inventory optimization. It helps companies overcome demand volatility to achieve reliable forecasting and inventory targets and deliver service level excellence.
Big Win in 2012: Gartner’s SC Executive Conference featured a Danone presentation on trade promotion forecasting, showing how ToolsGroup software helped it achieve significant improvements in uplift, net ROI and forecast accuracy.
Vistaar Technologies, Inc.
www.Vistaar.com
Specialty: Vistaar SmartTrade is a comprehensive solution that integrates all aspects of price promotion strategy, execution and performance management for consumer goods manufacturers.
Big Win in 2012: Vistaar continues to expand its beverage alcohol customer base with marquee brands, like Bacardi, DFV, St. Michelle and Terlato wines, driving the industry momentum toward adopting pricing technology.
Vistex
www.vistex.com
Vistex provides visibility and insight into master data, pricing, contracts, rebates and incentive management processes for multiple industries. Vistex solutions ensure no money is left behind by plugging revenue and margin leakage.
Big Win in 2012: Sony Electronics went live with SAP Paybacks & Chargebacks by Vistex and SAP Incentive Administration by Vistex to manage its complex commercial terms and trade promotion negotiation and execution.
Vodafone Global Enterprise
http://enterprise.vodafone.com/consumergoods
Specialty: Vodafone Global Enterprise helps consumer goods companies keep ahead of the game with innovative mobility solutions in supply chain management, remote asset management, sales force automation and consumer engagement.
Big Win in 2012: Vodafone’s Connected Cabinet solution transforms sales-generating assets into connected intelligent assets communicating location, motion detection, temperature and stock levels, enabling greater asset visibility, lower operational costs and increased sales.