SKUtrak: How can I get the best value from my customer relationships?

Your business and its success depend on the relationships that you create, nurture and grow with your grocery retail customers. Your goal is to maximise sales, minimise costs, and work collaboratively with your retail customers to delight shoppers and your target consumers.

Modern retail relationships are powered by insight, information and data-driven evidence. This used to be the preserve of the big brands and category captains but with the insights that SKUtrak surfaces, every supplier should now strive to be a trusted source of advice, make complex decisions with confidence, and retail-friendly recommendations with certainty.

Buyers don’t have time to meet all suppliers regularly yet they are bombarded with new product proposals, promotion suggestions, and market analysis. They want to work with well-informed suppliers, who understand product performance - good and bad - and can use their understanding to help build category performance through objective insight. Account managers who can provide this level of understanding, with clear evidence presented in an easy-to-digest manner, quickly become trusted advisors to grocery buyers.

Supply-chain managers oversee thousands of products and cannot monitor every product in every depot and store every day, in their pursuit of optimal stock levels and order volumes. Retailer sales forecasting is often sophisticated and powerful but it isn't a crystal ball; it is not an infallible record of future events and needs to be interpreted as a guide in the context of recent and recurrent patterns. Sometimes you will know that stock levels are not quite right, or that forecasts just look ‘wrong’, whereas at other times you may have delivered everything that was ordered, and yet on-shelf availability isn’t what it should be.

SKUtrak advocates and supports data-driven decision making and helps you to develop a rich understanding of trading patterns that you will use to offer insight, recommendations and proposals to your customers:

The visual nature of SKUtrak reporting and analytics is perfect for that quick "I saw this and though of you" email that shows you have your buyer's interests at heart;
The mapping of inbound (supplier-to-depot) and outbound (depot-to-store) service metrics helps you to understand and articulate why order volumes aren't high enough to meet availability targets;
SKUtrak's centralised data store (DSR) provides a consistent collection of data across your major customers, mapped to your product, brand and category definitions, so that you can provide the same excellent service to all of them; and,
The automated nature of SKUtrak means that you spend your time exploring, understanding and reporting on trading performance rather than collecting, organising and correcting the data necessary to do the job reliably.