The 2022 Fastest Growing Firms: Impact Analytics Inc.

Number of Billable Consultants:

Client Industries Served: Retail, CPG, Hospitality

Website URL: https://www.impactanalytics.co/

We deliver on the promise of AI-driven solutions through our cloud-native platform, centered around the core belief that we arrive at 'Better decisions with AI' and empower retailers with real-time visibility into their business to enable smarter decisions and optimize costs by adding millions back to the bottom line.

Consulting: What were the main factors that contributed to your firm's exceptional growth?

Agrawal: We believe in "better" decisions with AI to be at the center of our products and philosophy, and have been leveraging this to deliver revenue, EBITDA for our retail clients and superior customer service and satisfaction to shoppers. There are key management principles we follow that have contributed to our firm's exceptional growth:

• Exceptional client focus: Happy clients is our mojo. Client service is the key independent variable in our success model. All learning projects / pilot studies are done with a client use case in mind.
• Investment in people's capabilities and skills: To encourage innovation and drive digital transformation, we accelerated our investments in people's learning and skills development to ensure that they have all the required tools and resources to learn and upskill themselves. This helps us bring the best of Impact Analytics to our clients.
• Value-based approach to work: Impact Analytics emphasizes the value focused way of working in a systematic way. These values have helped shape our culture and have made us purposeful and successful.
• Delivering a significant number of POCs: We believe in rapid prototyping and performing proof of concepts to test any viable idea. A carefully crafted set of scenarios can give a clear picture of our product impact that is aligned with the client's goals, which helps us innovate quickly.
• Innovation-focused track: While every team member is expected to be innovative (guided by the competency model), we also have a team of people working on cutting-edge areas and technologies. We call them the pod. They are the center of excellence in terms of that area of technology and are incubators of major innovations within the organization. They are also responsible for evangelizing these innovative ideas within the organization and with our clients. We are constantly innovating and expanding our product portfolio.

Consulting: How would you say you've managed to maintain growth during the unprecedented past three years?

Agrawal: The coronavirus pandemic has altered not only retailers' financial outlook for that year but also their long-term direction. The shape of the retail industry has fundamentally changed, with a huge shift to digital spend and digital transformation. And this shift makes our products more relevant than ever for retailers now. We have continued to innovate our products in the past three years to solve the key problems retailers face and help them navigate through turbulent times.

Here are a couple of examples of how our initiatives have translated into positive impacts, and have helped us and our clients to maintain growth during the unprecedented past three years:

• Accurate forecasting to navigate through tough times: Impact Analytics uses >20,000 ML models tracking more than a billion SKU-location combinations each day, helping make our forecasting the most accurate in retail. During COVID, our models used non conventional data including Google mobility data to pinpoint spikes in demand on essential goods to help retailers better serve their customers and the community. As a testimonial to this, one of our clients who is a leading fabrics & crafts retailer said our models helped them allocate to the right stores at the right time during COVID (The retailer kept their stores open, as their business was classified as an essential service). More recently, a month ahead of the Federal Reserve releasing their findings, we predicted that there were signs of inflation easing.
• Helping retailers mitigate inflation: We are helping retailers take several transformative steps to address inflation and drive a step-change performance to protect their margins. IA's robust predictive analytics considers millions of data points across myriad variables such as seasonality, trends, inflationary pressures, price elasticity, supply chain challenges, changing customer preferences and many more, to provide actionable insights around assortment, allocation, pricing and overall financial planning. Combining technological innovations, such as big data analytics and ML-based algorithms, IA has helped several leading retailers to tackle shifts in consumer demand patterns and rising inflation by providing superior demand forecasting at granular levels. In addition to this, we have also developed two innovative indices to track inflation and pricing/promotions to analyze promotion depth and breadth across categories, price points and brands and more.
• Pricing War Room for retailers: Impact Analytics has constructed holiday pricing war rooms with leading retailers over the last seven years. We work in partnershipwith merchandising teams in a tactical hands-on manner, enabling them to make data-driven decisions. We understand the factors at play: historically high inflation, unprecedented supply chain issues, changing customer preferences, global economic and geopolitical instability, and to top it all off, a looming fear of recession. The upcoming holiday season will be the toughest pricing environment in recent history for merchants. Our fiscal year 2022 pricing war room is all retailers need, to thrive this holiday season, and maximize profitability.

Consulting: How is this year shaping up for your firm?

Agrawal: This year is going pretty well for us. We have onboarded new clients, launched new products, and have been recognized and rewarded by some leading organizations. Below are some of the key highlights:

1. Despite the disruptions, we have continued to grow and added some giants of the retail world. We also have unlocked some of the biggest RFP wins and have had clients sign up for multiple integrated solutions.
2. We have successfully released new products while providing software updates on existing products this year.
3. We have been recognized by multiple publications as the fastest growing Retail AI SaaS products company. Recognized in 5 Gartner research reports as leaders in AI and Retail, including:

Gartner's Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies (July 2022) report in two innovation categories: Algorithmic Retailing and Retail Assortment Management Applications.

IA's AssortSmart named in Gartner's Market Guide for Retail Assortment Optimization Applications in Merchandising, June 2022.

IA's pricing suite is included in Gartner's Market Guide for Retail Unified Price, Promotion and Markdown Optimization Applications Long Life Cycle, July 2022.

IA's pricing suite is included in Gartner's Market Guide for Retail Unified Price, Promotion and Markdown Optimization Applications Short Life Cycle, August 2022.

IA's InventorySmart recognized in Gartner's Market Guide for Forecasting, Allocation and Replenishment Solutions August 2022.

4. We have been ranked by the Financial Times in their list of The America's Fastest Growing Companies for the third consecutive year in 2022

5. Our team has shown tremendous growth in the year 2022. Our team headcount has increased by 30% this year.

Consulting: How would you describe your firm's outlook for 2023? Where do you see the most opportunities?

Agrawal: Global economic headwinds make our products more relevant than ever for retailers. Impact Analytics is poised to solve the key problems that retailers are facing today.

• Our demand forecasting engine and merchandising suite helps retailers to predict the demand accurately in these unprecedented times and help them to align their merchandising decisions effectively, which helps them to balance their inventories and get their pricing right.
• We aim to add more clients and build more products to solve the retailers problems and empower them to make smart data based decisions, unlock process efficiencies, transform their businesses and achieve unparalleled business benefits.
• We are in the process of moving all our products to an end-to-end smart platform. IA Smart Platform is a fully integrated web-based platform that automates all retail merchandising planning workflows.
• We have strong diversity and inclusion strategies to embrace and value diversity in all its forms and we aim to grow as a more inclusive and diverse organization
• We will remain committed to sustainability and continue to interweave sustainability into our platform and drive a positive impact by helping customers reduce their carbon footprint and eliminate waste.

Consulting: What would you say are your firm's biggest challenges in 2023?

Agrawal: While we as an organization are prepared to overcome challenges and navigate through turbulent times, but the uncertainty around the recession, persistent supply-chain bottlenecks and inflationary pressures could be challenging for us.

Consulting: What does being named one of Consulting's Fastest Growing Firms mean to your firm, your employees and your clients?

Agrawal: Being named one of Consulting's Fastest Growing Firms can boost our employee's morale and motivation. It can also help us attract the best talent. This recognition can also help boost our brand visibility and support some business development activities.