Jeff Love - VP of Product
Published on April 8, 2025
Smart Bid Awarding from Spoiler Alert cuts the time spent managing excess inventory by 64% and lowers logistics costs by an average of 11% while boosting revenue by 10%.
For CPG manufacturers focused on increasing both revenue and operational efficiency, one of the most glaringly obvious areas to innovate is in the liquidation of excess inventory.
The process is manual, slow, and relies on spreadsheets, email and a lot of people’s time to offer products, create sell sheets, and manage sales. It is frustrating and inconsistent, and often creates more problems than it solves.
With Smart Bid Awarding from Spoiler Alert, we automate not only the auction and awarding process to optimize revenue, but also add logistics intelligence to ensure suppliers are building the most profitable awards possible. Without any manual thought or decision-making, Smart Bid Awarding offers suppliers a way to maximize revenue while minimizing effort, costs, and wasted inventory.
Smart Bid Awarding not only can cut the time spent managing excess inventory by 64% and lower logistics costs by 11% but can also boost revenue by 10%.
How It Works
Let’s start with an example: You’re a CPG manufacturer with 100 batches of inventory, or SKUs, that you’d like to offer to 10 different buyers in a blind auction.
Without Smart Bid Awarding, it could take hours or even days to wade through offers from buyers, find the best bids that meet your requirements and minimums, and allocate them efficiently so that no inventory is left behind. Even if you just take the highest offers, it can still be time-consuming, and you may be costing yourself more in shipping and delivery than you’re making in revenue (yes, that’s a true story from one of our customers!)
With Smart Bid Awarding, our algorithm automatically takes the rules inputted by suppliers and analyzes each bid, awarding them based on the best offers. Sounds simple enough, but where Smart Bid Awarding really starts to optimize both revenue and results is in logistics. With this evolution of our algorithm, Spoiler Alert helps CPG suppliers build the best trucks, finding the most efficient delivery solutions to create the least truck lanes possible — and the lowest costs.
Our algorithm goes beyond just the highest bid and creates the best possible overall offer that takes into account transportation costs, ensuring suppliers aren’t losing money to ship.
Results of Smart Bid Awarding
By prioritizing the highest bids, and then filling up trucks more completely, Smart Bid Awarding not only ensures higher revenue but minimizes costs — all in seconds without any manual decision-making from CPG teams.
And while decisions can be overridden, and teams can make changes before finalizing awards — they rarely need to. In over a year since rolling out Smart Bid Awarding, our top 10 adopters execute over 90% of all their awards using the algorithm. That’s 90% of manual effort gone! And that’s not all…not only does it eliminate spreadsheets, phone calls, and bid-by-bid comparisons, Smart Bid Awarding also has increased revenue by 10% through selecting bids based on true profitability, and reduced freight costs by 11%.
One Customer’s Success Story
Before Smart Awarding, Ferrara estimated they spent on average three hours awarding per sales cycle. While they used Spoiler Alert to find the best bids for their inventory, they had to manually manipulate awards to enforce their logistics rules and ensure that revenue always covered the costs of delivery. That meant enforcing minimums over five times the typical lane cost since they had no visibility into the individual costs of truck lanes.
With Smart Bid Awarding and new visibility into delivery costs, Ferrara was empowered to reevaluate their awarding strategy and lower their conservative truck lane minimums. After consulting with their finance and logistics teams, Ferrara developed new net revenue minimums that still covered costs, while creating fuller trucks, canceling fewer orders, and increasing their order fill rate from 76% to 90%.
Before adoption of this functionality, Ferrara was spending 12.7% of their liquidation revenue on delivery costs. After adoption, Ferrara now spends 10.3% on delivery costs and their average delivery cost per delivery truck lane dropped 21%. All of this happens automatically, saving their teams 25% of the time they used to spend on awards.
“This is a huge benefit to not only ourselves but to our customers who ultimately receive that product,” says Bank Chavalit, Senior Analyst, Lifecycle Management at Ferrara. “We're earning more revenue on inventory sold while optimizing transportation and warehouse costs across the board.”
Beyond Revenue
More than just saving teams time and increasing revenue, Smart Bid Awarding with Spoiler Alert is also taking trucks off the road and preventing more inventory from ending up in landfills. These efficiencies not only benefit CPG suppliers and buyers, but also our planet.
For Ferrara, balancing the cost of freight against the value of bids decreased their average truck lane distance 33%, from 822 miles per lane to 553. This reduction saved 117,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, the equivalent of the CO2 needed to power 30 typical American homes for a year!
Meeting Our Customers’ Needs
Ultimately, Smart Bid Awarding fulfills the most requested needs of our customers at Spoiler Alert, offering a way to not just award the highest bids, but also optimize revenue while delivering more inventory.
“Before Smart Awarding, there was inventory that was never awarded, trucks that were never sent, and even though there were buyers who wanted those SKUs, it ended up in landfills,” says Spoiler Alert Director of Product Jeff Love. “Now, we are maximizing revenue while delivering more inventory, keeping it out of landfills, and optimizing the experience for CPG suppliers.”
Ready to unlock more value from your excess inventory?
Discover how Smart Bid Awarding can help your team save time, reduce costs, and increase revenue. Book a demo with Spoiler Alert today and see Smart Bid Awarding in action
