CPG Resources

CPG runs on a chain of handoffs: brand teams forecast demand, sales negotiates trade terms with retailers, supply chain plans production, and distributors get product onto shelves. Each function optimizes its own piece, and each handoff is where value quietly disappears. A promotion planned without real POS visibility overships or understocks. A demand signal from a retailer's shelf takes weeks to reach a plant scheduler. Trade spend gets negotiated against last year's assumptions because this year's data is sitting in someone else's system.

None of this is a people problem. CPG organizations hire smart, capable teams at every stage of that chain. The problem is structural: marketing, sales, supply chain, and finance each see a different slice of the same demand, and nobody's system connects them in real time. The result is a familiar set of symptoms — trade promotions that don't lift volume the way the plan predicted, out-of-stocks next to warehouses full of the wrong SKU, category reviews built on stale data.

Closing those gaps means treating demand, pricing, and inventory decisions as one connected problem rather than a sequence of departmental ones, with people still making the calls that require judgment. That's the lens this hub takes on CPG: not another dashboard, but a way of thinking about where yield leaks out of the business and what it takes to catch it before it does. The articles below cover trade promotion, demand planning, retail execution, and revenue growth management in more dep