Featured Customer
Retail Solutions Demand Signal Management is a strategy that has created value for P&G all along our transformation process. It is a critical foundation for many of the projects we run, and in this economy, having this level of business-centric visibility will be all the more important.
-Allan Barr, Supply Chain Manager, The Procter & Gamble Company
Sales and Marketing Solutions
New Product Introductions
Each year, well over 100,000 new products are introduced into the US retail industry. Depending on surveys, it is estimated that 70 to 80% of these launches fail - at a huge expense to both the retailer and the manufacturer: on average, each retail grocery store spends $270 to introduce each new product and in an extensive study, the Federal Trade Commission found that it is not uncommon to have slotting fees, at approximately $25,000 per metropolitan area per product, exceed 50% of first-year sales for a product. Yet the out-of-stock rate for new product introductions remains higher than the average, and it typically takes four weeks for the average new product to scan at 80% of a major retailer's stores.
Retail Solutions optimizes the probability for each New Product Introduction (NPI) to succeed: by leveraging retailer data in real time, CPG companies are able to increase shelf availability and revise forecasting on the fly. We can help you ensure that no matter how good (or bad) the product, the NPI is planned and executed flawlessly to maximize sales - while minimizing investment in unsuccessful launches.
Retail Solutions customers leverage downstream data to monitor NPIs in real time in the critical next few days after the launch and correct any distribution issues. Our customers then are able to leverage these insights to fine-tune forecasting and replenishment on an on-going basis. Some of Retail Solutions use cases for promotion management include:
- Selling in new items
- New product introduction forecasting and planning
- Real-time replenishment
- Real-time in-store execution
NPIs managed with Retail Solutions have a higher store scanning rate in the initial few days and weeks, a lower out-of-stock rate and a better forecasting accuracy to fuel your S&OP process.
- Use historical launches to help predict the shape of your launch demand curve and update as sales begin - potentially leading to updating the 'clone' item the current forecast is based upon to make sure updated forecasts accurately reflect sales expectations
- Immediately identify the stores not scanning the product to speed up initial distribution in line with marketing campaign to intervene in the store
- Identify store & DCs that are under- or over-stocked and take corrective actions (such as sending store-specific orders, updating replenishment forecasts, cancelling orders, etc...)
Case Study: see how Coca-Cola optimized the launch of its 18-pack at Food Lion
Retail Solutions provides its customers with an extensive set of templates and algorithms to help them automate every stage of the management of a NPI, from the initial planning and forecasting to post-event analysis.
- Provides a logical decision making framework to make complex NPI decisions and reports easier to analyze and more intuitive
- Role-based alerting and reporting to ensure marketing, demand and supply planning/S&OP as well as sales can contribute to the launch success
- Refreshes in near-real time to ensure actions are taken immediately on the most recent data - not on last month's results
- Integrates to store operations and merchandising handheld and activity scheduling systems to guarantee actionability of the alerts
- Manages unlimited attributes and hierarchies at the store- and item-level, originating both from the retailer and the supplier