Category Archives: Return on investment

Revionics Acquires Retail Optimization, Inc. to Offer End-to-End Merchandise Optimization Solutions

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Revionics, Inc. and Retail Optimization, Inc., a provider of cloud-based assortment and micro and macro space optimization solutions, today announced that Revionics has acquired Retail Optimization’s business and related assets. This acquisition extends Revionics’ Life Cycle Price Optimization Solutions with the addition of Retail Optimization’s cloud-based Assortment and Micro and Macro Space Optimization Solutions.

The combination of these two solutions brings all the merchandise planning levers – price, promotion, assortment, space – together to deliver the most powerful End-to-End Merchandise Optimization Solution available in today’s market. Together these solutions help retailers breakdown merchandising organizational siloes and improve demand forecasting to better meet shopper needs and ensure retailers have the RIGHT product, price, promotion, placement and space allocation for optimal financial results and improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Offered on a highly scalable, high performance cloud-based platform, the solutions future-proof retailers from Big Data/Fast Data challenges, while providing speed-to-ROI.

“The key to becoming demand driven lies in the ability to effectively manage the intersection of demand, supply and product,” said Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner Research Vice President. “Demand-driven retailers gather information at each customer moment of truth, and utilize five interrelated strategies to translate demand insight into effective response and shaping activities, delivering higher return on assets, more inventory turns and greater revenue growth than their peers.”*

The new Revionics products that are now immediately available from the acquisition include:

  • Revionics® Assortment Optimization
  • Revionics® Macro Space Optimization
  • Revionics® Micro Space Optimization

For more information about these new offerings, please visit: www.revionics.com/merchandise-optimization

Retailers are battling intense competition and price-conscious, informed shoppers that rapidly shift their buying behavior. To compete effectively, retailers need to be more responsive to their shoppers’ product needs ensuring their assortments are tailored to the individual store and space, and are on-shelf available. Doubling in the last decade, out-of-stocks have been one of retailers’ largest headaches and profit loss areas, estimated to be a $107B problem in 2012. Studies show that a typical retailer loses 40% of intended purchases when a shopper encounters an out-of-stock, resulting in a 4% yearly revenue loss.**

According to a 2011 RSR Research study, retailers indicated that out-of-stocks remain a top retail challenge. Assortment and space optimization technologies that can effectively provide simultaneous top down/bottom up recommendations are required to enable a shopper-centric merchandising strategy that protects against out-of-stocks while reducing excess inventory and carryings costs. Improving shelf-availability at a lower cost helps to maximize return on inventory and store real estate while improving customer satisfaction.

“This acquisition underscores our commitment to continually innovate with cloud-based solutions focused on addressing retailers’ most critical business challenges,” said Marc Hafner, Revionics’ President and CEO. “Retail Optimization has the same approach we do, which is to incorporate next-generation predictive analytics and demand-based science into our offerings to ensure our customers have best-of-breed solutions that drive a competitive advantage.”

Leveraged and proven by tier one retailers and manufacturers throughout North America, Retail Optimization’s solutions deliver advanced predictive analytics and demand-based science that incorporates macro and micro spatial constraints and tradeoffs into assortment planning and optimization to determine the right product, placement and space allocation at the store/aisle/category/SKU level.

The solutions bring together otherwise separate but critical information in determining an optimal merchandising execution program – shopper demand information, loyalty data, market data, market basket data, store layouts, planograms, business rules and strategy, and financial objectives. Real-time ‘what-if’ scenario planning capabilities allow retailers to compare and contrast the optimized results of different strategies before selecting one for implementation. Using a proprietary simultaneous ‘top down/bottom up’ optimization approach, retailers can now boost productivity of existing shelf space by determining the highest benefit product mix while simultaneously reducing both the out-of-stocks of that product mix and cutting its inventory requirements.

This acquisition is part of Revionics’ master product roadmap and vision to be the first and only vendor that can offer retailers a next-generation, fully integrated end-to-end merchandise optimization solution, which eliminates the remaining siloes in the merchandising organization by infusing price and promotions into the assortment and space decisions. Bringing assortment, space, and pricing together requires two critical integrations – Space-aware Pricing and Price-aware Assortment. Combined with the existing integration available today, Revionics’ integrated end-to-end merchandise optimization will be able to deliver a Coordinated Master Demand Plan.