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In Foundries, CRM & Customer Experience

WISY PLATFORMS: BRINGING VISIBILITY TO PRODUCT AVAILABILITY IN CPG RETAIL

Wisy Platforms is building a predictive, decision-analytics retail operations and execution platform to help retailers solve and overcome the product availability challenges that they have lived with until now.

Using Wisy;

  • Employees performing visual inspection of retail shelves experience an improvement in the amount of time they would otherwise spend doing this task. Practically speaking this is a reduction from 20 minutes of work doing manual inspections to no more than 1 or 2 minutes using Wisy’s AI-enabled platform.

  • Retailers, CPG manufacturers and brokers experience a 90% or higher improvement in the accuracy of data about product availability on store shelves, and

  • Retailers, CPG manufacturers and brokers experience revenue gains of between 3% and 10%.

In addition to bringing visibility to Product Availability, Wisy also offers the following:

  • Price checks,

  • Real-time share-of-shelf KPIs,

  • Planogram compliance checks, and

  • Competitive intelligence: Wisy detects known or unknown competitors’ products on the shelves and transforms the data into business intelligence. This is particularly useful for addressing an industry trend where new niche brands gain market share at a much faster rate than established brands. Wisy provides alerts when new competitors come into a category and keeps track of their growth over time and per location.

Wisy is currently working on real-time object tracking using the video mode on mobile phones. This feature makes it easier for users to capture large shelves without the need to take many pictures. Wisy is also developing predictive analytics to optimize product assortment and basket analysis.

The platform enables CPG retailers, manufacturers, suppliers,wholesalers and brokers to make better strategic, tactical, and operational decisions by decreasing the complexity of the systems they have to interact with while introducing simplicity and convenience into their workflows. Employees just have to be able to take pictures or videos of retail store shelves using any mid-range smartphone.

Wisy’s breakthrough is in its ability to instantaneously run all its analytics processes and algorithms on an employee’s mobile device without the need for an always-on internet connection.

Incumbent solutions are complex, difficult, slow, cumbersome, and impractical for the fast pace at which retail execution must move. Most incumbent solutions require a high speed internet connection in order to produce results.

Wisy is lightweight, portable, simple, fast, and affordable. Anyone who can use a smartphone camera can be trained to use Wisy to perform retail operations tasks. The platform works for large multinational CPGs and retail chains, and for smaller CPGs, retail stores and brokers. It works on a stand-alone basis. But, it can also be with retail execution systems, ERP systems, retail data clouds, retail analytics systems and so on. It can be integrated into a retailer, manufacturer or broker’s existing systems – for example, customers of SAP can find Wisy in the SAP App Center.

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In Article, Portfolio News, COVID-19

29 tech startup founders and CEOs share their fears and strategies for navigating the coronavirus crash: ‘We are now wartime CEOs’

Min Chen, CEO of Silicon Valley data analytics startup Wisy, was born in China but grew up in Panama, where she lived through the turmoil of the 1989 US invasion. She and her co-founders are “wartime survivors” who endured the violence and the disruption of that period.

“That experience, somehow, has prepared us for this crisis,” she told Business Insider. “We come from places where there was nothing, even in times of prosperity.”

Like other startups, Wisy’s biggest challenge right now is cash flow, but Chen and her cofounders hope keep their team together. While other startups have begun shedding jobs, they’re taking a different approach. “Instead of laying people off, we decided to all take pay cuts,” she said.

That adaptation feels critical: “Companies that die are those that couldn’t adapt,” she said. 

In Wisy’s case, new opportunities have come up because of the crisis. An international organization that wants to use Wisy’s technology for tracing infections and anticipating outbreaks has invited it to apply for grants.

“Even if we don’t have the grant, we would help,” she said.

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In Foundries, Press, San Francisco, Portfolio News

SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco Customer Experience Cohort Caps Off with Demo Day

The 12-week program provided the startups with access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and access to SAP customers. It concludes with an invite-only Demo Day event for customers, partners and industry guests — such as Ronan Dunne, Verizon Consumer Group executive vice president and CEO; Beverly Parenti, The Last Mile executive director; angel investor Dan Scheinman and others — to meet the founders and hear about their collaboration with SAP and its customers.

“We are very excited about what has been achieved in the past three months and that we were able to help these startups deliver winning outcomes and incremental value to our customers,” said Ram Jambunathan, SAP.iO managing director and SAP senior vice president head of Corporate Strategy.

The cohort consists of the following startups:

  • Constructor.io is an artificial intelligence (AI) commerce search and discovery solution that learns from usage to increase personalization and conversation rates. Constructor personalizes results from users on-site and online and optimizes them for business metrics relevant to the retailer.
  • Breinify is a time-driven AI platform that predicts and acts on an individual’s highly dynamic interests. The technology blends traditional machine learning and AI techniques with complex temporal algorithms to make granular intelligent decisions that vary for each individual at any time.
  • FINDMINE increases commerce orders by using machine learning to generate and display product collections that can be used together. FINDMINE ensures shoppers are able to see full product sets that answer the question “How do I use this?” It can be employed for every product and customer, and across every channel (e-commerce, e-mail, in-store, and for associates and customer support).
  • Wisy is an engagement platform that gathers unique consumer and market insights for brands and retailers while increasing consumer engagement through mobile experiences.
  • Idiomatic identifies top product and service issues by analyzing large amounts of customer interactions with AI and machine learning. Idiomatic helps companies turn customer feedback into customer intelligence through its voice-of-customer platform, which identifies and tracks all issues and trends in customer support inquiries, Net Promoter Score survey responses and app reviews.
  • Askdata is a natural language engine that turns text questions into queries that search across enterprise data for the best answer. Business users with no technical skills can search for data in natural language with convenience and productivity.
  • SetSail accelerates pipeline and flexibly drives strategic priorities in weekly sales incentive systems with machine learning and natural language processing. Customer events and e-mail sentiment are analyzed to objectively measure and reward true deal progress, allowing sales leaders to reward their representatives every week

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