1. Advanced Retail Science Drives Profitable
Category Management
Brian Hart has 30 years’ experi-
ence in the retail industry, including
20 years as a merchant and the
remainder in consumer products
and software consulting. Brian
has led marketing strategy,
go-to-market initiatives, and best
practices implementations with
customers.
As Solution Market Director for
Planning and Optimization at
Oracle, Brian helps retailers to
leverage new assortment, pricing,
promotion and space solutions.
He has extensive experience
in Category and Space
Management.
By Brian Hart > Solution Market Director, Oracle Retail
Grocers face an increasingly complex and competitive landscape
as club, drug and dollar stores muscle in on their territory.
It is imperative for grocers to connect with consumers by providing a localized neighborhood
experience. Yet many leave profit-making opportunities on the table because they lack the
insight necessary to optimize category management across their operations.
To solve this dilemma, grocers and other merchandisers need a sophisticated, end-to-end
solution with an intuitive interface that enables them to build optimized, consumer-centric
assortments driven by advanced retail analytics.
Increase Revenues and Gross Margins
To achieve success in the face of increasing competition, grocers must focus on improving
revenues and gross margins by combining disciplined, simple process flows with
advanced retail science. A solution set should include the ability to:
• Compare retailer data to market data to identify opportunities
• Create company-wide strategies establishing category roles, tactics, and scorecards
• Leverage point-of-sale and market data to recommend, select, and execute
customer-specific assortments
• Identify optimal assortments, product-facing counts, and placement
• Leverage advanced analytics to dynamically build an optimized number of clusters using
various scenarios based on any number of criteria including customer segments,
demographics, store size, volume, climate, geography, and many more
• Establish, manage, analyze, and execute store-specific merchandise floor plans with full
integration to AutoCAD
• Improve headquarters-to-store accuracy for execution and compliance by empowering
collaboration and surveying capabilities
Localization and Targeting
Grocery merchandisers are operating across wider geographies than ever before. At the same
time, they are serving widely diverging populations, even within the same city or region. To
compete, they need to support varied and highly flexible assortment strategies and planograms.
To support this level of localization, grocers need a solution that utilizes retail science in order
to: localize and target assortments along with facing counts (assortment planning and optimiza-
tion); optimize scenarios using multiple attributes (advanced clustering); use the retailer’s own
data for customer decision tree analytics; calculate incrementality and cannibalization (demand
transference), and optimize category section sizes (macro space optimization).
A Mature, Integrated, Science-Driven Solution
Grocers and other merchandisers must choose a category management solution that is built
on a mature, reliable retail analytics platform that has demonstrated proven results for other
companies. All key data and tools, including forecasting and category management as well as
pricing and promotion, should also be integrated. And for a true edge in the market, they must
choose a provider with advanced scientific capabilities that continues to invest in and prioritize
this area. By zeroing in on the knowledge gained through analytic insights, grocers can optimize
category management across operations to increase revenues and gross margins, rising above
their competition.
Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no
contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. Oracle is a registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
RETAIL
C
CONNEC T WITH US
V I E W P O I N T
Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together