Introduction

Mahindra & Mahindra Limited ('M&M') is the flagship company of the Mahindra Group,
which consists of diverse business interests across the globe and aggregate revenues of
around USD 19.4 billion. The company operates in nine segments: automotive segment
comprises of sales of automobiles, spare parts and related services; farm equipment segment
comprises of sales of tractors, spare parts and related services; information technology (IT)
services comprises of services rendered for IT and telecom; financial services comprise of
services relating to financing, leasing and hire purchase of automobiles and tractors; steel
trading and processing comprises of trading and processing of steel; infrastructure comprise
of operating of commercial complexes, project management and development; hospitality
segment comprises of sale of timeshare; System tech segment comprises of automotive
components and other related products and services, and its others segment comprise of
logistics, after-market, two wheelers and investment.
Quality problems
When you are making products on a large scale, there can be issue of product quality. As to
meet standards with each product is very difficult. With Mahindra & Mahindra Limited there
are quality issues with car manufacturing department. Mahindra’s newly launched product
Scorpio Classic is purchased by one person in Delhi, he goes to aftermarket to upgrade the
music system of car, when they remove dashboard they saw rusting on iron parts in steering
wheel section, which is shame for company as the new car got rust. They must manage their
inventory properly, so that cars do not expose to rain and ultra-violent rays.
Inventory problems
When the COVID-19 period was there every manufacturing sector company faced shortage
of raw materials for their production of products. It was the same case with Mahindra &
Mahindra Limited, there were supply chain issues and shortage of auto OEMs because most
of the suppliers were from Maharashtra, where the scenario for covid cases is serious. Also at
that time, the industry was moving to BS-VI from BS-IV inventory was exhausted.
Demand Forecasting
In the past few months, the unprecedented pandemic has impacted well established demand
forecasting workflows Demand for essentials broke the seams, but DIY, apparel, footwear,
consumer durables’ retailers witnessed a sharp decline in sales. The prolonged store closures
and the staggered return to normalcy is forcing buyers and merchandisers to relook at ways
and means to predict these demand aberrations and tweak their replenishment algorithms to
generate near perfect purchase orders.
Non – essential retailers are having to deal with slow-moving / dead spring stocks in the
stores, and excess summer stocks in the warehouse with slowdown in allocations to the
stores. Grocery retailers, on the other hand, are grappling with optimizing fill rates on the
shelves, removed multi-buy pricing, and imposed purchase restrictions. They have reported
sharp rise in slow-moving stocks of private labels / store brands as shoppers focused more on
availability and accessibility as a result of panic buying. Inventory that would have taken
longer days to turn, was moving faster resulting in stock-outs in matter of hours if not in
minutes. (Parankusam, 2020)
Solutions
Quality Problems - To overcome the quality problems company should appoint specific
team for quality check of product time-by-time and store the inventory in covered place
where it is less prone to rainfall, and direct sunlight which heavily impacts the product which
causes damages to it. Company can R&D on that product which causes or affect quality of
the product by which outcome will be well defined product with good quality material.
Inventory Problems - To resolve the inventory problem the company should make
warehouses to store their raw material so, that if in future for some time raw material is not
available, they can use from that stored material. This activity will help them to run their
operations seamlessly.
Demand Forecasting - Whilst there is no silver bullet to resolve these aberrations overnight,
the solution lies in how robust or scalable the demand forecasting applications are, with focus
on the following:
• Cost Savings – Reduce transport, inventory holding costs by leveraging big data
effectively, and reducing the frequency of forecasting to weekly analysis. The
closer the forecasting is to inventory turns, the lower the costs of moving
inventory across the order to cash lifecycle
• Less Touch, Contactless – with the help of AI / ML demand forecasting should
be self-driven with minimum manual interventions. The pandemic has taught
pertinent lessons to everyone, and the replenishment engines would have to be
trained to be smarter and be able to generate forecasts for the peaks and troughs.
• Supply Chain Efficiencies – As the fear of the pandemic recedes, the pent – up
demand in categories like DIY, Cosmetics would potentially lead to a spike in
sales thus creating a a halo effect for other categories. Retailers could witness a
shift in destination categories, albeit briefly, and all this would compel them to
ensure that efficiencies like IoT sensors, automated warehouse processes,
paperless transactions are focus areas. This would lead to faster inbound
shipments and result in store determined dynamic allocations.
As re-mediation efforts start picking pace, and stimulus packages are disbursed, the
emergence of the New Normal will re-baseline all retail strategies, and demand forecasting
will be at the forefront. Predicting shelf level visibility, real time replenishment
algorithms, and centralized view of inventory would be key in driving the near- and long-
term business benefits.
At RCG, we are focusing on delivering an AI driven Demand Forecasting Solution–
powered by Stylumia, built on proprietary one-of-its-kind machine learning algorithms with
data at internet scale. Whether it is forecasting trends, spotting winning products, predicting
demand of new products, balancing width, and depth of assortment, or localizing assortment
for a store, our Demand Forecasting solution covers it for you.
Some of the organizations that have witnessed 60% improvement in sales velocity, 30%
optimization in inventory and 20% increase in full price sales include Vero Moda, Jack &
Jones, Only, Pepe Jeans, New Balance, Pepe Jeans London, Fossil and many more.
To accomplish this, our Demand Forecasting solution focuses on 4 specific areas that can
help clients overcome the common hurdles of demand forecasting and achieve accuracy:
• Apollo – Test new product potential before investing, grade relative potential of
new ranges, and buy just the right amount of inventory
• Market Intelligence Tool – Laser sharp fashion forecast, instant validation of
trends and products, gain entry into new, unexplored categories
• Storey – Localize assortment for every channel / store, optimal first allocation,
dynamic intelligent replacement / replenishment
• Fashion Intelligence Tool – Simplify In-season analysis, decision making, &
action, post-season diagnosis for range correction
The Demand Forecasting solution would accomplish a robust pilot in 12-16 weeks for a
cluster of the client’s Departments, Categories and Sub-Categories and deliver a state-of-the-
art machine learning model for the client’s use case, process the data, identify and handle
anomalies, engineer features as required, establish a baseline lift to the current forecast
accuracy using train-test-validate method and showcase the output accuracy across various
metrics. (Parankusam, 2020)

References
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.capitalmarket.com/Company-Information/Information/About-
Company/Mahindra-and-Mahindra-Ltd/365

Parankusam, B. (2020, May 12). Tech Mahindra.