Resources

Our President and CEO will be a featured speaker at the upcoming Trade Promotion Association event in Chicago.  If your organization is concerned about trade promotion, this is a must attend event. The Trade Promotion Management Association (TPMA), is a non-profit trade association for professionals and organizations involved with trade promotion. TPMA provides members with... Read more »

Our Accelerated Analytics product was recently highlighted in the retail blog ShiSh List.  We recommend taking a look at their posting as well as looking around the blog.  Lots of good content on retail collaboration. Accelerated Analytics was designed and built using Microsoft SQL 2005 and ProClarity (for the non-geek that means latest great technology) for business users to... Read more »

A surprisingly large number of organizations are still using spreadsheets as the backbone of core business processes like POS data analysis, category management, and vendor collaboration.  There are many reasons for this, and even for a business intelligence professional like myself, I cannot simply dismiss their use altogether.  Although, it would be good for business... Read more »

Stock outs are a serious problem.  Research has shown stock outs average 8%, but can be as high as 40% on promoted items.  So, retailers and vendors are losing up to 40% of their potential sales on some items.  The financial impact is often exasperated by an overly large order to compensate for the back-order... Read more »

Show of hands, how many of you know how to calculate price elasticity?  Well, if you are like me, you know the general concept but the math is a bit rusty.  So here is a quick and dirty refresher. Price elasticity is a measure of how demand for a product is influenced by price changes.  This... Read more »

A picture truly is worth a thousand words…especially when you are analyzing data.  Which would you rather have? A spreadsheet with a thousand SKU’s showing sales and gross margins or a picture that instantly tells the story?  If you have spent hours analyzing data in Excel, you probably have a strong preference.  When we work... Read more »

The perfect order is a very useful measuring stick for the retailer and manufacturer to measure performance.  According to AMR Research, “the perfect order is the ability to produce orders that are complete, accurate, and on time.”  Research estimates a 3% improvement in perfect order performance will increase profits by 1%.  Elements of the perfect... Read more »

Many times, when I talk to retailers about sharing data with vendors, I hear some version of “Well they are not asking for it,” or “only if they can show me how they will use it.” It reminds me of the classic quandary…Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or in this context… which... Read more »

The benefits of optimizing the retail supply chain using better demand planning and collaboration with suppliers are well documented. Studies of retailers by the Harvard Business, Grocery Manufacturers Association, National Retail Federation (NRF), and AMR Research show results of 15% less inventory, 17% better perfect order performance and 35% shorter cash-to-cash cycles.   Documented benefits... Read more »