Trade Optimization Solution

Optimize your trade spending

The IBM® DemandTec® Trade Optimization framework consists of five core components designed to enable better plans and sales forecasts, provide fewer process inefficiencies, lower costs and improve retailer collaboration and execution. The Trade Optimization solution addresses critical functionality while incorporating innovative shopper insights, and is a framework that can improve strategic trade investment decisions with more precise and accurate predictions of volume and profitability. Through core Trade Promotion Optimization components that include predictive analytics, you'll get a wider perspective on strategic level planning, customer level planning, and shopper insights.

Solution Components

IBM DemandTec Trade Optimization

Drive strategic trade and customer-level planning.

• Allows strategic teams to use science in their decisions on price changes, display and ad coverage, and to make adjustments in trade funds or accrual rates that may effect annual sales and profitability
• Enables teams to understand consumer demand and use this insight to allocate funds for regions and accounts
• Designed to help customer teams understand ideal promotional tactics, not individually but within the larger category campaign
• Trade Optimization is a customer-level planning system that enables development and prediction of trade volume and profitability metrics to transform your trade planning and provide a sustainable competitive advantage

Support predictive and post event analytics.

• Trade Optimization provides the ability to understand what has happened in the past and predict what is likely to happen in the future
• Provides a framework designed to enable an estimate for a given price with, for example, 60 percent ad all commodity volume (acv) and 80 percent display for the first week in July, even if it has not been tried individually or as a combination
• Post event analytics present the retrospective on what was planned and what was executed, providing clarification for trade optimization
• Allows the identification of operational gaps that can be addressed or accounted for in the future
• Might also identify new causality that can be used to improve the model for future predictions

Incorporate shopper insights into the mix.

• Introducing DemandTec Shopper Insights into trade decisions allows customer teams to address differences in shoppers and make use of more effective demand generators
• Using DemandTec Shopper Insights can help increase sales and brand loyalty
• Shopper Insights can help convert shoppers to buyers while increasing spending effectiveness by segmenting and targeting shopper behavior.

Integrate with existing systems.

• Trade Optimization is designed to enable varying degrees of integration that do not require full exchange of information, thus enabling flexibility with existing systems
• Ability to pass promotional events and plans to a trade planning management system and back again creates a repeatable cycle that can greatly improve efficiency
• Trade Optimization’s deal management system can simplify the deal approval process with the retailer (terms of the deal are imported directly)

Enable retail collaboration.

• Collaboration may be founded through joint insights, common modeling or joint systems — and Trade Optimization is designed to enable all three
• IBM DemandTec solutions use comprehensive analytics that are designed to measure events and their planned impact on the category and store brand
• Matched with an in-depth understanding of how the retailer’s pricing strategy can affect the promotion, this leads to better forecasts and stronger partnerships

Services, Training & Certification

• Training & Certifications
• Services