Closing the Gap Between Commercial Plans and What Happens on the Shelf - with Stephanie Lilley of Reckitt

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Stephanie Lilley, VP of Transformation for Europe at Reckitt. Stephanie joins Emerge's Daniel Faggella on today's episode to unpack why the gap between a consumer goods company's commercial plan and what is executed in store is so persistent and so expensive. She walks through where ANA is beginning to close that gap, verifying shelf compliance through things like image recognition, routing field reps to the stores where their day will return the most, and mining the store level inside field teams gather but really get to use, and why fresh store level data is the one thing none of it works without. Just a quick note for our audience that the views expressed by Stephanie on today's program do not reflect that of Reckitt or its leadership.

In this episode, we cover the gap between commercial plans and actual field execution. To go deeper on this topic and learn how retailers are using deviation detection to flag fortune and transactions in real-time, and applying computer vision to optimize in-store operations and reduce shrinkage, download our free PDF report, AI in Retail Executive Cheat Sheet at emerj.com/rcace1.

That's emerj.com/rcace1 to download your copy. Now the conversation with Stephanie.

Daniel Faggella (1:51)

Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie Lilley (1:52)

Hi, nice to meet you.

Daniel Faggella (1:53)

Absolutely. Well, we're glad to be able to have you here because as we were just talking about off microphone, you're in a space that's maybe could not have been said as undergoing exceedingly rapid transformation two years ago, but now very much is. So I want to start on the commercial plan side of retail, where you spent a lot of your earlier career and still are now impacting from a transformation standpoint. Let's talk about how significant the gap is between a commercial plan and what gets executed, and what that means in terms of business costs. So a lot of what's happening with AI out in the field starts with some of these core friction points we're still wrestling to get over. How do you tee that up in terms of what you're seeing in market now?

Stephanie Lilley (2:30)

Yeah. So thanks very much for talking about this subject because I find it absolutely fascinating, as you can imagine. And I'm really going to focus today a lot on the physical store and park a little bit the online store, but I'm obviously very well aware that that's a big part of most people's businesses. So today I'm going to spend a bit of time on physical. And it's a great point because the gap between commercial plan and what you want to happen as a CPG company, and then what actually gets executed in the store is probably one of the biggest disconnects that can happen within a consumer goods organization. Firstly, because there's a lot of different people who touch that, as you can imagine. So not only is it your own company and the different departments that sit within that, but also then you've got a retailer that you're working with, you've potentially got either your own field store reps or third party merchandising reps that are also going into a store. And secondly, because if your plan is not clearly measurable, or there's no way of measuring the impacts that you're having, it's really difficult to know what you've actually executed and therefore understand what it is that you potentially want to change for the future. So when you have field teams, you can obviously use people to measure implementation. We have good data, you can use data to measure implementation. Often you can have too much data and it's really difficult to understand what is actually going to be useful and what's not, which is where AI comes in and we can talk about it later I'm sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean that what you're expecting to be delivered will be delivered. And finally, even where you do have people in stores, you may not necessarily be sending them to the places they're going to have the biggest impact potential. And that is also a really big challenge that we find. Like just think about the various stages of planning to execution as a company that you need to go through. So you agree on what you want to be true and you build probably some sort of success model or a perfect store or vision store or whatever you call it. And then you need to go and get that agreed with a retailer. If you're working with a big retailer who has centralized buying, that needs to be agreed there. If you're working with an independent store, you need to send a rep to have that agreed within execution. If you're working with an independent store, you have a bit more control over that.