Featured Customer
With the help and support of Retail Solutions, we were able to recommend increased space on Dunkin' Donuts coffee based on real consumer demand, considering real shelf availability. With a 34% overall sales growth, the results speak for themselves
-Amy Derrenberger, Category Development Analyst, The J.M. Smucker Company
Sales and Marketing Solutions
Category Management
Why should category management be a cyclical process with a quarterly update rather than a real-time activity leveraging the most recent insights provided by the retailer? Why should it be limited to a few players in the industry, whereas all suppliers can contribute their specific product expertise to make the overall category better?
Retail Solutions changes the category management industry paradigm by enabling every supplier to leverage its own data along with third party information to submit creative idea to the retailer on how to increase sales and shelf productivity in near real-time.
Retail Solutions customers leverage downstream data to support their retailer customers in making the best decision for both parties, in real time. Our customers constantly know when they have opportunities to fine tune their assortment to optimize the use of their allotted shelf space - or present the relevant facts to the retailer to drive increased shelf space. Some of Retail Solutions use cases for category management include:
- Selling in new items
- Adding points of distribution for an existing item
- Adding shelf space for an existing item
- Optimizing assortment (and micro-assortment management)
- Minimizing impact of cut downs and assortment rationalization
Retail Solutions customers drive increased sales, optimize assortments at the lowest possible level (each individual store) and catch and react to changes in consumption trend faster and more accurately. However, most importantly, Retail Solutions enables each supplier to become a better partner to their retailer customers by identifying the optimal approach that increases sales and margin levels for both parties.
- Identify over- and under-performers in your assortment: monitor outliers in a category, by planogram type or by store geo-demographic cluster while following mix / flavor preferences and overall category volume
- Optimize shelf space productivity: measure opportunity gap of not having an item across all stores (or in a particular planogram) in comparison to the performance of poorer performing items with higher distribution
- Identify planogram issues driving out-of-stocks: measure out-of-stock rates relative to shelf capacity to identify stores where it's impractical to rely on in-store associates to replenish shelves fast enough
- Roll out the right decisions faster while quickly terminating poorly performing tests: immediately measure results of test runs in a few stores to quantify benefits of a complete roll-out for new assortments or merchandising strategies
Retail Solutions provides its customers with an extensive set of templates and algorithms to help them automate most complex category management analytics and help them drive the right decision faster.
- Provides a logical decision making framework to make complex assortment and merchandising decisions easier to analyze and more intuitive
- Bases all category management decisions on real facts rather than on theoretical modeling
- Handles both your own downstream data and category data (if available from the retailer), at the lowest level of granularity (by day, by store, by SKU)
- Refreshes in real-time to ensure decisions are taken on most recent data - not on last month's demand
- Seamlessly incorporates external data sources such as syndicated data, census data, weather data, promotion and coupon information
- Manages unlimited attributes and hierarchies at the store- and item-level, originating both from the retailer and the supplier