Games manufacturer and creator USAopoly is using technology from California-based Alloy.ai to combine sell-through, shipment and forecasting data.

This has enabled more accurate planning, data management time savings and better retail execution, resulting in six-figure sales increases at Target and Amazon.

The company also saved an estimated $240,000 from efficiency gains and $80,000 by reducing excess inventory as a result of using the Alloy.ai platform.

“Having data that are easily accessible and accurate is critical to understanding what’s working and what’s not, knowing what consumers are buying, making accurate forecasts and getting the right products to the right places at the right time,” said Joel Beal, CEO of Alloy.ai. “That’s where Alloy.ai comes into play, and the benefits that USAopoly has derived from having a single source of truth illustrate how powerful unified and accurate data can be.”

USAopoly CFO and COO Tom Nirschl added: “Alloy.ai fits our needs as we transform into a data-first organisation, and it fits us culturally given how well both of our teams work together.”

USAopoly has created some of the most popular party and family games in the marketplace, such as Tapple, Blank Slate and Telestrations as well as themed versions of such popular games as Clue, Monopoly, Risk and Trivial Pursuit. The company sells games through retailers such as Amazon, Target and Walmart. With Alloy.ai, USAopoly is strengthening its relationships and increasing sales with its retailers.

For example, USAopoly used Alloy.ai to reveal a sales decline with a major US retailer was due to the retailer running significantly fewer promotions on USAopoly products than they had run the previous year. USAopoly was able to bring these data to the retailer to illustrate the root cause of sales declines and strengthen its partnership with the retailer.

In another instance, USAopoly employed Alloy.ai to learn that Amazon was ordering product at below the level of true consumer demand, and the retailer corrected the issue when presented with the findings. Amazon had used historical sales that didn’t account for out-of-stocks from last year to order Blank Slate and other products, not accounting for the fact that the lower sales were actually a function of out-of-stocks. When presented with proof of the recent sales velocity in Alloy.ai, Amazon responded by placing an out-of-cadence manual order with USAopoly that was incrementally valued at $412,000.

USAopoly has also benefited from significant time savings as a result of leveraging Alloy.ai, resulting in over $240,000 in savings due to efficiency gains from automation.

Collecting, combining and preparing data can be a time- and resource-intensive process. But with Alloy.ai, companies no longer need to spend massive amounts of time and effort manually downloading and aggregating data, and then cleaning, modelling and harmonising those data before they can analyse them.

“The typical process of working with data involves spending about 80% of your time preparing the data and just 20% of your time doing the actual data analysis,” said Eric Richardson, manager of forecasting and data analytics at USAopoly. “For example, every week my team used to dedicate about six hours pulling point-of-sale data from all of our retailers and feeding it into a template for forecasting. But now Alloy.ai handles most of that upfront data preparation, so we avoid any potential user error involved with data preparation, our costs are lower, and my team and I can spend a lot more time analysing data and making business decisions based on that analysis.”

USAopoly has now adopted Alloy.ai’s technology across its organisation. Employees benefit from up-to-date information they can easily view and use at any time. The marketing team uses Alloy.ai to see immediate sell-through and gauge the value and impact of their digital and print campaigns. Finance employs Alloy.ai to get visibility into what’s in the pipeline and to understand whether point-of-sale data are supporting USAopoly’s revenue goals for the year.

Meanwhile, Alloy.ai provides the company’s purchasing team with more tangible visibility into what’s actually happening in the market so members of this team can purchase with confidence, with the correct lead times, and know that data support these decisions.

“Alloy.ai is our preferred partner for demand forecasting, sales and inventory data aggregation and building reports based on what’s happening at the point-of-sale,” said Richardson. “Alloy.ai allows us to connect directly with our retailers and obtain a unified source of accurate data, and the company’s meticulous attention to detail and personalised approach convinced us that Alloy.ai was the right choice.”

Alloy.ai is a demand and inventory control tower purpose-built to help consumer goods brands sell more products, save time and solve complex supply chain problems. Alloy.ai is built on a cloud data platform powered by more than 850 pre-built connectors that integrate point-of-sale and inventory data with supply chain data, giving brands complete and instant visibility into demand and inventory across their network.