Manthan
Manthan Using Analytics to Bring the Shopper Closer to the Brand

Just yesterday, retail was about land-grab. The motto was to be the first to the best corner space on the high street. Today, retail is about data-grab. Information differentiates winners and losers. And this is driving the enormous interest around Big Data.

The modern retailer has great expectations from information and analytics. They expect analytics to help discover associations in data that are counterintuitive or subterranean. They expect analytics to help predict outcomes with multiple decision scenarios. And most importantly, they expect analytics to action their decisions. And this is where Manthan steps in.

Manthan provides analytics solutions and products to the retail and CPG industries–bridging the gap between the new retailer and the new shopper with analytical insights. “Two significant changes happened in the last decade,” says Atul Jalan, founder and CEO of Manthan. “The first is that information today is intelligent and can arrive tailored to the seeker’s context. The second change is that analytics has completed the loop–analytics has become an intelligent driver of underlying business processes.”

Described as ‘the most innovative company’ at the Stevie International Business Awards and a recent entry into the Top 20 software solutions providers list on the RIS News Software Leaderboard, are eminently satisfying for Atul Jalan. Atul believes that analytics is the last frontier in business computing and this is in fact what led him to launch Manthan, his fourth entrepreneurial venture.

“Our key, recent achievement has been making analytics-driven decisions actionable,” says Atul Jalan, “This far, analytics products could only claim to analyze and help decision-making.

But at Manthan, we can claim to analyze, decide and do. We do not just provide insights that aid decision-making, but we ensure that they can be actioned intelligently.”Over the years, its focus on only retail and CPG manufacturers has helped Manthan develop an unparalleled understanding of the shopper. This familiarity has helped them adapt the most recent development in Big Data analytics into actionable business solutions.

Atul Jalan illustrates an interesting case study about how Manthan helped increase the number of price changes of a tier-one cosmetic company. By deploying Manthan’s analytical tools, on an average the cosmetic client has been able to make price changes 22 times a year per product, as opposed to 2.5 times a year. What Manthan did was not just bring the best of math and science to optimize pricing, it could also take these prices across to the business, which could simulate the outcome of these prices, apply business constraints, socialize the new prices, get approvals and write back to underlying price management systems. This created a bottom-line impact of close to $225 million in the first year of implementing Manthan’s services, from its regular $15 million revenue.

The ability to use Big Data intelligently to directly impact the bottom-line has brought Manthan an impressive list of clients across 18 countries. Clients include companies like Love’s, Teavana, Crocs, Ecco, Ipsos, Novartis, McDonald’s, Ripley, SM Group, Robinsons and NTUC Fairprice.

A considerable percentage of retailers are unaware of the data available with them and the impact that data can have on their business. “To survive, you need data at the heart of your business. And to win, you need analytics to think for your business,” signs off Atul Jalan