That help save 100’s of working hours and win Shoppers’ hearts
Time and automation…the 2 resources that are often lacking in many retail organizations and that prevent teams to do as much as they wished to delight their shoppers. In this paper, we look at 2components of marketers’ jobs: Category Planning and Promotion Planning.IN these components, we are looking at 3 areas where automation helps save literally hundreds of hours: Diagnostics, Score Cards, and History; and what decisions these automated methods help take
Category Planning
# 1. Automated Category Diagnostics
Take the best decisions to activate your Category on Assortment, Price, Promotion and Distribution in minutes!
A complete category diagnostic usually delivers the causes of the sales variations and what should be done to improve the performance. It should at least cover the performances of assortment, distribution, prices, and promotion impact. Delivering such a diagnostic, from data collection to crunching and analyzing, can take tens of hours per category. At worst, the diagnostics is not done due to the lack of time and wrong decisions can be taken. The pain Hypertrade addresses here again is time and data accessibility. With Hypertrade, you can automatically create a diagnostic in less than 2 minutes.
4 deliverables to make the best decisions
- Measured impact of each sales driver
In the example above, it is clearly visible that despite strong promotion sales and improvement in distribution, assortment and price changes had a negative impact on the sales performances.
❔What decision can be taken from there:
• Identify which of these 4 sales drivers need to be improved.
• Define which sales driver needs to be prioritized.
- Dive down to the SKU by Store
A simple click on any of these drivers gives access to the products and store details
At a glance, category managers and merchandisers can identify:
- Which promo products drove sales down?
- Which new promo products impacted sales and how much?
- Which promo products stopped being promoted and how did it impact sales?
❔What decisions can be taken from there: my promotion strategies
- Increase or decrease the number of promotions?
- Increase or decrease promotion items distribution?
- Select the promotion items we want to re-use in the future?
- Select the promotions items we don’t want to re-use in the future.
- Measured impact on Retail Indicators
Category Indicators vary each time the sales change. They deliver critical insights on the category’s assortment efficiency and its structure. They can be accessed, with their evolution vs. the last period, immediately.
❔What decision can be taken from there: range and assortment strategies
- Reduce or increase the number of skus.
- Reduce or increase the number of Brands.
- Reduce or increase the number of price-points.
- Reduce or increase the distribution of items across channels and stores.
- Measured Shoppers Behaviors that generated the sales
Traffic, basket penetration, average purchased price and number of items by basket define sales performances, and their variation explains sales results. These insights are almost instantly available, onthe same page:
❔What decision can be taken from there: the shopper strategies I need to grow sales.
- Does my Activity plan need to focus on penetration?
- Does my Activity plan need to focus on a number of items?
- Does my Activity plan need to focus on value per item?
⏱️Estimated time saved by Diagnostics: 14 hours
# 2. Score Cards
Score Cards are an efficient, fast, and extremely powerful way to
- Measure key performances.
- Benchmark the competition.
- Identify what are the next priorities to improve performance.
Score cards measurements are usually established in a set of different perspectives:
- Performances vs. last period
- Performances vs. the category
- Performances vs. the competition / other brands in the category
With Hypertrade, you can automatically access your score cards in less than 2 minutes, including the priority actions. Here is your global Score Card Menu
Then you Growth Origins and the Range Status
A simple visual display show when there is an improvement (green) or a challenge to address (red)A quick glance at the ongoing promotions’ performances and their evolution
Simply focus on the Brands and sub-categories that require attention.
Benchmark sales, promo and range performances in a blink and focus only on the areas that need your attention.
Estimated time saved by score card: 6 hours
Promotion Planning
#Promo Calendar
We have seen with the Category Diagnostics and Score Cards how simple it is to measure:
- Our Promotion Performance
- Our promotion over or under exposure
- Our Competitors Promotion Activities
The decision we now face is to decide, whether we want to invest or disinvest:
- When this should be done?
- Where this should be done?
This is when the Promotion Calendar becomes very handy. In a single view, marketers can visualize each promo (their own and the competition), their dates, and performances.
Clicking on any of these values, it becomes easier to look at performances items by items, sales by stores or even effectiveness.
❔What decision can be taken from there: how do I want to plan my next promo moves
- Confirm my decision to invest or reduce my investment in promo.
- Select the channels where I want to invest.
- Select the period during which I want to invest.
⏱️Estimated time saved by promo calendar: 8 hours
#Promo History
Talking about Calendar inevitably drives us to mention history. It’s typically quite difficult to keep the history of all promos that have been run, the scope under which they have been launched and their corresponding performances.
Here again, technology and Ariane come to the rescue by enabling users to access all promo products history in just a click.
The first step is to just select the Brand and see all the items that have been promoted during the selected time period.
The second step is, for any selected item, look at when it has been promoted, how many times, in whichchannel, and what was the selling price at which the best performances have been achieved.
❔What decision can be taken from there: Which Item to select for my next promo
⏱️Estimated time saved by item: 4 hours
About Ariane
Ariane is a Category Management solution, published b y Hypertrade, available as a Platform or as a Plug-in in existing solutions such as Power BI. Developed by retailers for retail players, it integrates hundreds of retail-expert algorithms. Ariane is currently used by tens of companies in South East Asia, Middle East and Africa. Contact us to book a demo
