Outstanding Category Management
Creating an effective data management strategy
Category management strategies are commonplace for most businesses in the retail and manufacturing industries. The Partnering Group and IDG defines an eight (8) step process for creating tactical plans for successful category management. Creating tactical plans can improve the effectiveness of a category manager’s role in the retail environment, ensuring that consumers’ demands are continually met or exceeded at the point-of-sale.
This eight (8) step process begins with defining the category and its role in the retail environment. This gives category managers a starting point to develop a comprehensive assessment of the current and past performance of the category to create a set of realistic goals and objectives for the category. With the first five steps in place, category management professionals can work to create strategies, implement those strategies and start the process again for additional categories and annual updates.
Most businesses do not use the full eight (8) steps of the process. Instead, they create their own streamlined process. Strategy development can easily be customized to meet the goals of your business. The best strategies take into consideration a collaborative environment between suppliers and retailers using real time demand data from a wide number of sources.
While category management strategies are essential to creating and meeting sales goals, creating an effective data management strategy can make any category management strategy more cost effective and profitable. Many businesses in the consumer goods industry still use a series of spreadsheets and reports to collaborate and share data between sales managers, category managers, marketing directors and C-Level executives. Though few programs can match the ease of use and availability of programs like Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, using these programs alone can be time consuming and costly when considering the hours put into entering data, updating spreadsheets, combining reports and creating cohesive charts and graphs.
This is where companies benefit from demand data analytics programs like DataAlchemy that can integrate with common Microsoft programs and reduce the time spent updating spreadsheets and reports. Based on data obtained from point of sale history, buying patterns, economic conditions, market research, consumer demographics, regional statistics and seasonal changes; category managers and demand planners can create and implement a strategy for category management that is based on new trends and statistics from point-of-sale and many other data sources.
Using this data can improve strategies by ensuring that all of management strategies are current and relevant – based on the past and focused on the future. To create an effective data management strategy, ask yourself the following questions about your business.
- What types of data do you receive and report on? Consumer demographics? Seasonal reports? Market research reports? Point-of-sale? Nielsen? IRI? Web 2.0 interactions?
- How do you currently report this data? Is it the most cost effective way to handle reporting?
- Who needs to view the data? Who can benefit from the information in your reports?
- How often are your reports updated?
- What products are available to handle all of your real-time demand data?
- Which products offer the easiest distribution of data?
- Which products offer the easiest implementation?
Creating an effective data management strategy will streamline the category management strategy development process of your organization. Category managers, sales managers and marketing directors get valuable real-time insight into the data that affects sales and profitability, rather than using outdated information. Throughout the coming months, we will explore the creation of a data management strategy and how to create strategies that will prepare your business for the future – giving you tips and tools to create strategies that fit your business’ needs and give your business a competitive advantage.
