
Zebra Technologies Corporation, a cutting edge innovator of enterprise solutions, giving businesses a performance edge, today revealed its intention to become the owner of Profitect Inc., a privately-held, leading supplier of prescriptive analytics for the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries.
With the use of machine learning as well as prescriptive analytics, Profitect’s solution detects opportunities to impact sales and margin for some of the most recognized retail and CPG brands in the world in the most positive way. Profitect makes use of data from across the value chain to improve inventory as well as price accuracy, out of stocks, unsellable merchandise, supply chain inefficiency, and assortment discrepancies. The solution detects a potential opportunity and has the ability to get suggested actions, sending them directly to a worker’s mobile device, providing instructions for resolution in a step-by-step fashion. Simply by getting users to understand and act on data, Profitect customers typically realize sales lift, and margin and labor productivity improvement as well, allowing for a better overall consumer experience.
Zebra will also use the investment to advantage, to increase the rate of the development of its Savanna data platform by the acquisition of Profitect’s talent, technology, and skillsets. Merging the real-time data that Zebra solutions capture, with Profitect’s access to operational data, prescriptive analytics, and machine learning, Zebra will work with its’ partners to strengthen front-line workers even better, across all verticals using the insights they require in the making of make better, faster, smarter decisions.
Zebra plans to fund the acquisition of Profitect using a combination of cash-in-hand alongside fully committed financing, available under its credit facility. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and it is visualized to close in the second quarter of 2019. The transaction is also expected to be immaterial to sales and profitability in the near term.