Three new solution developments for retailers from Periscope

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Periscope, a McKinsey Solution, focusing on price, promotion, and assortment optimisation, has announced three new product developments designed to help organisations rapidly transform their approach to customer centric pricing, category management and margin optimisation. Advanced Insights, Category Factory and Data Vision, are all Solutions as a Service offerings designed to help clients overcome the most serious challenges facing 21st Century retailers, who are drowning in data and lacking in insight.

Advanced Insights

Advanced Insights, which is available as a subscription service, gives retail and CPG clients a robust menu of services and capabilities that support ongoing advanced customer insight research for buying behaviour and decision making, driving increased customer engagement and revenue growth. Understanding the market landscape through in-store price checking, online intelligence or elasticity studies are all supported, as well as observing online channels for new products and assessing how they are resonating with customers.

Advanced Insights can help identify market opportunities, underpinned by a true understanding of the customer and how they shop. Modelling tools allow marketing and sales teams to identify promotional effectiveness patterns, brand connections, find out about the real competitive set, run lift forecasting and create advanced promotional baselines. As a service, Advanced Insights can be configured to match the rhythm of each individual client, ensuring a cost effective solution for their needs.

Category Factory

The Category Factory is a new framework that innovates old school assortment planning. Like Henry Ford creating the assembly line, Category Factory's six-stage process makes annual category planning more structured, more rigorous, tying retailers and vendors more closely together, and embedding customer-centric decision-making at every stage.

The new process combines core merchandising activities into one integration point, such as: customer insights, assortment optimisation, market intelligence, base price setting, and promotion effectiveness to drive improvements in vendor collaboration and customer facing execution. While many of these elements are not new in retail, the standardized framework and approach make it a compelling process which drives synergistic outcomes.

Data Vision

At a time when retail businesses are struggling to gain fast insight from a slew of expanding and rapidly changing data sources, Data Vision's on demand smart business intelligence, detailed reporting and dashboards reveal new business insights, improving operational performance and supporting the growth of margin performance by between 100-200 basis points.

The Data Vision Service is designed to help businesses gain accelerated insight into not yet syndicated data sources, without the requirement to invest in new systems. Integrating a wide range internal and external data sources, including ERP systems, data warehouses, sales terminals, and data from trusted industry providers including Nielsen, Information Resources Inc. (IRI) and CCR. Data Vision helps organisations effectively manage their data collection and analysis to create advanced visualisations that support decision making on optimal spend and resource allocation. Data Vision also includes rich semi- and fully automated data management tools to greatly reduce the impact of managing a unified data source on IT departments including QA, auditing, data cleansing, updating and enriching.

When businesses start working to improve margins, increase revenues and drive closer customer engagement, early changes can have a substantial impact, but sustaining that initial impact can be challenging," said Channie Mize, General Manager for the Retail Sector at Periscope. "Advanced Insights, Category Factory and Data Vision are part of Periscope's program of innovation to empower retailers and CPG companies with solutions that help them better collaborate, increase insights, and quickly leverage opportunities in the market."