The grocery market covers food stores, supermarkets, superstores, hypermarkets, convenience stores, wholesale distribution, cash & carry, food service etc. AMP2 is uniquely equipped to serve this range of outlets for both bricks and mortar and on-line E-commerce channels. The market has consolidated dramatically over the last two decades and many groups now operate a range of different outlets to serve a wide range of customer segments and geographical areas. Today’s retail software needs to support many different go-to-market strategies. Store formats, business structures, customer differentiation, assortments, multiple retail and wholesale channels and competitor impacts must all be capable of great flexibility in a fast changing business and economic environment.
AMP2 is a product of its time, attuned to these important needs and challenging the old silo structures where pricing, promotions, markdowns, advertising, media, loyalty marketing and category management are undertaken in different systems and often without knowledge of each other’s decisions. Consequently, many retailers still don’t know the combined effect of all the parts of their go-to-market offer for a particular period or market. Even if they were to deploy the most advanced optimization on prices and promotions, if they haven’t brought these disparate systems and spreadsheets together in one system, they will still be operating sub-optimally.
The grocery sector has adopted a variety of methods and processes to undertake its work. Most common has been the adoption of category management, a business philosophy to manage all of the marketing, merchandising, buying and selling activities of a retailer’s business more commercially. AMP2 helps retailers manage this business approach and makes it operational, bringing together the many functions that make up the overall buying and selling elements of retail.
Almost every major market has become very competitive in recent years irrespective of company size or format. This means that retailers must rethink the methods and processes they are using to operate their buying and selling activities. The need to make the most of a particular market or assortment has never been greater; the need to respond to competitor activity never more necessary. The low inflation environment and low or even negative sales growth brought on by the worldwide economic downturn puts particular pressure on the grocery sector with its historically lower margins. We have become used to inflation and positive growth figures bolstering our businesses year-on-year, but these factors are now working against the sector and may never return to the same degree. Retailers need to think about these consequences as we all fight even harder for each dollar or market share decimal point.
Retail Express’s use of science and technology brings merchandising systems into this new decade and properly supports the category management philosophy with a much greater focus on analysis and evaluation with a hardnosed commercial and financial approach. This is represented in AMP2 with the category P&L which brings together the impact of all prices, markdowns, incentives, promotions, adverts, events, promotional displays, flyers, coupons, loyalty points, kiosks and mailers into a real time simulation that understands the effect of each touch point on the customer and the interaction of different touch points. Thus AMP2 presents the category manager with a financial go-to-market P&L before committing to the whole proposition so that it can tuned to obtain the best results. Of course this financial impact analysis is used in conjunction with the AMP2 optimization tools to achieve the best mix of the strategic positioning on price/promotions and best execution in regard to the competition and the market/budgets in the current week/period etc.,
AMP2 is the solution where science and merchandising meet – smarter science = better results.