End of life (EOL) refers to the point at which a software vendor ceases to provide support, updates, and security patches for a particular product. Some of the most notable examples are Microsoft’s Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6, Office 2010 and Adobe’s Flash Player. EOL technologies can also have a direct impact on other software solutions, as seen when Oracle’s Siebel could no longer run using the retired Microsoft ActiveX technology. Or, more recently, when custom built point solutions could no longer run because they were built on the discontinued Microsoft Silverlight. Here’s a reminder of some logos you (hopefully) haven’t seen for a while:

What Are the Pitfalls?

When a software solution reaches its end of life, several negative implications can arise, impacting the efficiency, security, and competitiveness of a business. These include:

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How to Handle End of Life Software

1. Cybersecurity Measures:

Strengthen cybersecurity practices to address vulnerabilities in end-of-life software. This includes encryption for data storage and ensuring compliance with industry standards.

2. Monitor EOL Status:

Stay vigilant about the end-of-life status of software to avoid disruptions. Assess the software’s relevance, revenue generation, and alternatives to prepare a sustainable plan post-support.

3. Technical Debt Management:

Manage technical debt effectively to prevent system failures and increased maintenance costs. This involves maintaining codebase quality, comprehensive documentation, and identifying critical areas with higher maintenance needs.

4. Exploring Alternatives:

Consider alternative support options or migration to a supported version of the software. Explore sandboxing, virtualization, or adopting open-source platforms for timely updates and community support.

Why Aforza?

To avoid the pitfalls of end-of-life software, businesses can adopt proactive measures and leverage modern solutions like Aforza to future-proof their operations.

• Regular Updates and Releases: Aforza’s model of three yearly releases ensures that the software stays current with the latest industry trends, features, and security enhancements. By staying up-to-date, businesses can mitigate the risk of using outdated software.

• Comprehensive Functionality: Aforza offers a suite of cloud and mobile apps designed specifically for consumer goods companies. By consolidating trade planning and field sales activities into one platform, Aforza streamlines workflows, reduces complexity, and enhances collaboration across teams.

• Scalability and Innovation: Built on the Salesforce and Google Cloud Platforms, Aforza provides scalability and agility, enabling businesses to adapt and grow in dynamic market environments. With continuous innovation and scalable infrastructure, Aforza ensures that companies can stay ahead of the curve and meet evolving customer demands.

End-of-life software poses significant challenges for businesses, including security vulnerabilities, compliance risks, and diminished functionality. However, with proactive planning and the right strategies in place, companies can mitigate these risks and ensure a smooth transition to modern solutions. 

Here are just a few of the some of the key features from recent Aforza software releases:

Enhanced Studio Workflows

Aforza Studio streamlines business workflows by bringing together digital asset management with powerful image recognition capabilities. Studio Vision automatically extracts text from your images, while Automated Image Tagging categorises them based on content. This eliminates manual data entry and ensures your marketing materials and product information are organised and readily accessible, empowering you to optimise field execution and campaign performance.

Streamlined UX

Aforza’s redesigned interface prioritises clarity and efficiency, leveraging a minimalist design for optimal navigation and information retrieval. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are now consolidated within dedicated KPI Consoles, offering a centralised view for performance tracking and analysis.

These enhancements, coupled with a streamlined user experience (UX), aim to empower the sales force with a more functional and task-oriented mobile application. This translates to improved operational efficiency and potentially reduces time spent on administrative tasks within the mobile app.

Love is in the air, and so are countless sales opportunities—it’s Valentine’s Day! Amidst the flurry of hearts and roses, Consumer Product businesses are gearing up to capitalize on this romantic season. There’s no better time to showcase how Aforza can be your ultimate partner in creating, checking, and maximizing the value of promotions in the season of love and beyond.

Let’s take a look at 3 of the key areas where your sales team can leverage the power of Aforza to deliver heart-stopping promotions, captivate a target audience, and drive sales growth during this romantic season. Get ready to meet Vanessa, Alex, and Tom—three team members of the Berry Mist beverage company, whose roles require special attention on a specific 40% off promotion this Valentine’s Day. We’ll see them design, check the compliance, and socially amplify the promotion, all with the help of the Aforza solution.

Additionally, she can gauge the performance of promotions in real time, providing insights for quick adjustments and optimal results.

In the Field: Promotion Compliance Check with Aforza

Alex, a Berry Mist merchandiser, is in the field at one of his stores. Ensuring promotion compliance is a fundamental requirement of his day-to-day; Aforza equips Alex with tools to seamlessly check and enforce compliance with the Berry Mist promotions designed by Vanessa.

The mobile app ensures that in-store promotions are executed as intended, maintaining consistency and adherence to brand standards. This feature not only streamlines operations but also supports valuable communication between the field and HQ, ensuring a unified approach to Valentine’s Day promotions.

He can access the appealing promotion graphics that have been delivered by the Berry Mist Design team through designated folders on Aforza Studio. Each asset for the campaign has been tagged so that he can access and download them with ease. Tom has quickly been able to maximise support for in-store promotions through leveraging Berry Mist’s engaging content on social. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

As production costs continue to rise, it has never been more important to offer the most relevant promotions to your customers and price them to perfection, everywhere. It’s time to place and promote products consistently on every channel.

And, as we’ve just seen, Aforza’s suite of cloud and mobile apps, tailored specifically for the Consumer Products industry, makes it easier than ever for your sales teams to create, check and maximise the value of every promotion.

Don’t let this Valentine’s season pass you by without unlocking the full potential of your promotions. Contact us today to learn more about how Aforza can help you execute the most effective promotions at the lowest cost, guarantee promotion compliance, and drive growth through your branded products. Leading Consumer Products companies have increased their average basket size by 250% with Aforza – embrace the power of Aforza and elevate your sales journey to new heights of success.

Press Release: Aforza Receives 5 Best In Class Distinctions POI 2023 Enterprise Planning Panorama

The POI research team evaluated leading vendors to help their manufacturer and retail partners understand the technology and related service options that can help them improve promotional outcomes and drive profitable growth.

Aforza Studio: Your Digital Content Execution Hub

Even with these risks on the table, the absence of a common point solution for image recognition in the Consumer Products industry has required that companies purchase and integrate multiple solutions.

This is where Aforza Studio comes in. A compelling alternative to in-house development, Aforza Studio is a pre-built platform tailored specifically to the needs of the Consumer Products industry. Leveraging cutting-edge technology, Studio ensures cost-effectiveness, faster implementation and access to specialised expertise. Through uploading just a single asset, Aforza can can automate actions in the field for customers with an end-to-end setup (such as cater for follow up visits if your products on the shelf are below a certain percentage) – no more time-wasting manual actions and calculations.

Aforza Studio excels in capturing and processing high volumes of store images, flawlessly detecting products and understanding share of shelf and planogram compliance. Its ability to tag images with actionable attributes enables teams to take proactive action to resolve stock and availability issues, driving operational excellence and revenue growth.

This is enhanced by our partnership with ParallelDots, a renowned AI company specializing in advanced IR solutions for consumer products and retail brands, and their product ShelfWatch – ParallelDots’ ShelfWatch uses Computer Vision to analyse images of retail shelf displays that generates perfect store KPI insights in real-time.

“In the fast-paced retail world, our ShelfWatch and Aforza Studio partnership offers Consumer Products companies a futureproof image recognition solution, blending advanced capabilities with continuous feature and functionality enhancements. This collaboration sidesteps the complexities and costs of in-house development, providing a ready-to-deploy, state-of-the-art service tailored to the industry’s unique needs,” said Angam Parashar, Co-Founder & CEO of ParallelDots. “Leveraging this leading platform enables companies to stay ahead of the curve, ensuring growth, operational excellence, and superior customer engagement with unparalleled efficiency and accuracy.”

Here are some of the key features of Aforza Studio:

• Protect up to 5% of revenues by immediately addressing out-of-stock issues with proactive actions.

• Ensure promoted stock is available in store and visible, reclaiming up to 70% of wasted trade investment.

• Increase customer NPS and prevent brand switching to a competitor when faced with an out-of-stock situation.

• Save thousands with just a one-time Aforza Studio set-up. Configure workflows, allow members of sales teams to do what they do best – sell.

In conclusion, image recognition technology presents a transformative opportunity for the Consumer Products industry. Its ability to streamline operations, improve customer engagement, and unlock valuable insights makes it an indispensable tool for companies striving to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced market.

By embracing established IR solutions like Aforza Studio, Consumer Products companies can harness the power of their visual data to drive growth, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional experiences to consumers worldwide. As the industry continues to evolve, those who leverage the potential of image recognition can be confident that they are at the forefront of innovation.

In the Consumer Products industry, the role of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software cannot be overstated. A 360 degree view of your Retail Customers is critical to success and you need to engage with them across all routes-to-market. Consumer products companies face a unique set of industry challenges, and the choice between vertical and horizontal CRM solutions can significantly impact their ability to protect margins and seize growth opportunities.

Aforza is a leading provider of CRM solutions for the Consumer Products industry, it’s our only focus. In this blog, we’ll look into the distinctions between vertical and horizontal CRM software, highlighting how Aforza’s tailored solutions address industry-specific challenges and needs.

Understanding Horizontal CRM Software

Horizontal CRM is a generalised solution applicable across various industries. This type of CRM software is versatile, offering a broad set of features that can cater to a range of sectors without being tailored to any specific industry use cases.

It provides general features that can be applied universally. Horizontal CRM software is designed to be standard and easily integrable into different business environments. However, it may lack the precision and depth needed to address the specific challenges faced by industries with unique requirements, such as Consumer Products.

Understanding Vertical CRM Software

Vertical CRM is a specialised solution designed to meet the unique needs of a particular industry. This approach involves creating software that caters specifically to the requirements and use cases of a particular vertical, such as the Consumer Products industry.

In the context of Consumer Products, vertical CRM involves understanding the industry’s unique data requirements, developing a tailored data model and supporting business processes. This model ensures that the CRM solution is not a generic, one-size-fits-all platform but one that resonates specifically with the industry’s requirements. This results in a faster time-to-value and more ongoing agility as the industry needs evolve.

The Tip of the Iceberg

Let’s imagine an iceberg as the CRM solution and breakdown what you actually get out-of-the-box, versus what is hidden under the waterline.

With Horizontal CRM, the software license makes up approximately 10% of your total costs. The other 90% will need to be spent on customising the solution to meet your unique industry needs. Common Consumer Product use cases like account targeting, segmentation, visits & task execution, audits, orders, promotions and offline mobile capabilities will all need to be built. Once built, it then needs to be maintained, else these customisations create technical debt.

With Vertical CRM, Aforza delivers this industry specific functionality out-of-the-box. With limited configuration and administration, you can tailor these processes to meet your business requirements and go-live quickly.

Aforza’s Approach

Aforza is a leading provider of CRM solutions specifically tailored for the Consumer Products industry. Aforza understands the complexities of this vertical and has developed a suite of capabilities to streamline operations, drive growth and protecting margins.

Here are 5 key areas that clearly differentiate Aforza as a Vertical CRM provider for the Consumer Products industry:

1. Industry Data Model

Consumer Products specific entities & relationships

• No need to customise generic objects
• Accelerates implementation by aligning seamlessly with industry-specific requirements
• Minimises errors & technical debt

3. Segmentation, Pricing & Promotions Engines

Deliver penny-pefect pricing on every channel

• The same engines run across every route-to-market channel
• Calculate exact pricing, even when offline
• Eliminate the need for time-consuming ERP system integrations

5. Digital Content Execution

Seamlessly integrate content into your sales processes

• Easily capture store photos to guarantee promotion compliance
• Understand availability & share of shelf with integrated image recognition
• Take action in real-time with content based workflows

Choosing the right CRM solution for your Consumer Products business is critical to success. In our decades of experience in CRM implementations, we’ve seen that having a CRM tailored to the unique needs of the industry is the difference between project success and failure. We are passionate about this!

Aforza doesn’t just offer a standardised bunch of features; it provides an industry-specific complete solution that makes operations smoother, helps companies grow, and ensures success.

Black Friday not only kicks off the festive shopping season but also serves as a critical milestone in the retail calendar, marking the start of significant profits in the industry. Initially coined to refer to the day that retailers moved from red ink (negative balance) to black ink (positive balance) in their financial ledgers, Black Friday still represents a major increase, with consumers in the UK alone expected to spend £3 billion in 2023.

Now expanding across the weekend into Cyber Monday (the eCommerce-focused counterpart), there are many advantages for retailers. For example, in the US,

• Total online spend from Nov-Dec 2022 reached $211.7 billion
• Retail sales on Black Friday increased 12% YoY.
• There were 196.7 million shoppers on Black Friday in 2022.

Aforza Visit

Product availability is one of the major pitfalls retailers can fall into during the Black Friday rush. To benefit from the hype around the day, you need to have your products in store so that they can be bought, rather than competitor products. With strategic account segmentation and route planning, Aforza Visit ensures that field teams can prioritize high-value accounts, guaranteeing products remain in stock where it matters most.

Streamlined field engagement and step-by-step merchandising enhance efficiency, ensuring products are readily available for customers amidst the Black Friday frenzy, making it an essential tool for maintaining stock levels and driving sales success.

Aforza B2B enables consumer product companies to navigate efficiently, reducing costs and extending their market reach through self-service channels. With AI powered 1-click ordering, telesales support for in-flight updates & amendments and guided promotional claims process, it’s easier than ever to drive consistency across channels with the same penny-perfect pricing and promotions everywhere.

Aforza Studio

With Aforza Studio you can empower retailers and suppliers to detail brands to perfection, ensuring that every piece of digital content resonates with brand identity and message. Precision across your brand is vital during Black Friday, where the sheer volume of marketing materials demands consistency and quality across all sales touch-points.

Moreover, Aforza Studio guarantees promotion compliance, enabling retailers to align their promotional strategies.

 This assurance ensures that every deal and offer communicated to consumers translates accurately across various channels, eliminating confusion and bolstering trust during this high-stakes shopping period.

Why Use a PIM Solution?

1. Margin Protection

2. Segmentation

3. Visit

4. Sell

5. Deliver

6. Promotions

7. Compliance & Regulations

8. Commercial Planning

9. User Adoption

We hope you find this index valuable and that you are able to leverage these metrics across your business. With record levels of inflation, supply chain bottlenecks, ever rising regulations and rapidly evolving consumer expectations, it has never been more important to ensure that you have the controls in place to confidently execute your sales strategy, and that your revenue carrying workforce is empowered to succeed.

We look forward to helping you understand every metric you need to run your business and grow revenues like never before.

• Business Domain: the area of the business you are focused on.

• Target Outcomes: these are the outcomes you are looking to drive within this domain.

• Key Performance Indicator (KPI): a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively you are achieving this target outcome.

• KPI Report: a summary of the data that supports the calculation of this KPI.

• Decision Dashboard: a collection of related KPIs that support business decisions by persona, strategy, category or channel.

1. Target customers based on profitability

Only send sales teams to visit customers when it’s worth it!

Sending sales teams to every potential customer is an unreliable, scatter-gun approach when focusing on longer-term margin protection. Not every customer account can justify the expenses of visiting and selling to them.

With Aforza’s segmentation engine, you can evaluate the performance of customer accounts ahead of time and determine your sales visits based on profitability; ensuring you get the maximum value out of every sales visit. Additionally, with optimised route planning, you ensure that your sales teams can get to these higher profit customers as efficiently as possible.

3. Control pricing & manage discounts everywhere

Keep your prices consistent and profitable on every channel.

Time and again, we hear customer frustrations about their inability to control prices and discounts across different routes to market. In worse case scenarios, field sales reps create arbitrary pricing and discounts on a customer-by-customer basis because price controls don’t exist. Arbitrary pricing and promotion execution erodes sales margins and creates disjointed commercial experiences across different channels.

With Aforza’s Omnichannel Pricing Engine, gain perfectly controlled pricing, promotions and placement of products with the ability to adapt to your customers’ changing needs, in real time, during store visits. This will enable your business to optimise and control pricing for each market and customer segment that’s going to drive a positive ROI. Ensure consistency and control across all your potential customer channels – whether they’re accessible in the field, via telesales, eCommerce, distributors and beyond. 

5. Cleardown all stock

Avoid getting to a situation where your stock perishes and cannot be sold.

There needs to be a definitive balance to the amount of stock provided to stores to maintain margin. Too little and your brand presence will shrink, reducing customer awareness as they take up other products. Too much and you run the risk of losing product volume to perishing waste and invoking administrative costs for damages, spoils & returns. 

With Aforza, ensure that you know how much of which products are in-store with real-time stock availability and a single commercial product catalogue. A customer might not always know what they have in store, and over-order to compensate; give your sales teams all the information they’ll need to make effective decisions in store, offline. Our end-to-end inventory management can provide total stock view and ensure that up-selling and cross-selling don’t risk becoming overselling.

Industry and global events must not be allowed to lead and dictate the actions taken by your business. While certain areas of most businesses will inevitably feel the impact of such events, steps can and should be taken to minimise their effects. For example, although supply shortages are likely to occur, they don’t automatically have to translate over to price rises for the consumer. It’s possible to approach potential fallout strategically and find other avenues to grow; consider, for example, shrinkflation‘ or launching and making intentional, segmented promotions.

The number of tools, tactics and data processes available to navigate the complexity of the Consumer Goods industry can be, quite frankly, overwhelming.

Get in touch to discover how industry leaders, such as BrewDog, are using Aforza’s solution for:

• Truly connected Trade Promotion Management

• Fully offline, guided Retail Execution

• Dynamic omnichannel pricing

• Integrated Digital Asset Management

• Real-time analytics & AI-driven engines