The way FMCG has embraced digital is underappreciated: Amit Doshi

We sometimes under-appreciate or underestimate the role that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies have embraced digital and the impact that digital has made on CPG companies.

The story is a few decades old. If you look at legacy technology implementation, FMCG was one of the first sectors to have embraced ERP to streamline demand, demand planning and therefore their manufacturing operations.

“Britannia has been a pioneer in doing that. We have had some of the best implementations in the industry as far as demand forecasting is concerned,” he said.

Doshi added that if one looked at Salesforce automation, the CPG industry has been again, a pioneer at embracing that. Now, the change that's happening is digital transformation in CPG. If you look at the end to end supply chain, or the value chain, digital transformation started at the back end with manufacturing operations, and then moved into logistics and so on.

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“The big shift that we're seeing now is that digital has finally started to impact consumer engagement as well, in three different ways, whether you look at the consumer engagement model, or if you look at how CPG companies can today read into trends and drive agile innovation and finally, even fulfill the consumer demand through through E-commerce.

It's in a way, a complete end-to-end transformation for most CPG organisations.

Speaking about Britannia, Doshi added that over the last one to two years, the impetus has shifted to digital transformation within the marketing function. “That has had an all encompassing impact, right from how we read into trends, and therefore develop product ideas to how we engage with consumers. And then we've been able to finally lay the foundation for a very successful ecommerce operation, which happens to be the fastest growing channel for us,” he concluded.