Measure true demand

Your success stems from understanding what shoppers want, when and where they want it, and how well you and your retail customers are meeting that demand. Step up from crude sales volume averages; SKUtrak presents your products' true demand.

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How can I truly understand demand... and what can I do with that information?

If we only understood demand completely then perfect supply would be easy. Right?

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Meet your shoppers' demand
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Maximise return from promotions

The problem is that demand is a complex beast and its many drivers are intertwined and obscured; a truly accurate picture would be beautiful but it just isn't possible, is it?

  • Poor supply over a few days, into a few locations, reduces sales in a region
  • Production problems reduce the flow of a key brand and sales are impacted across the country for a few weeks
  • Promotional returns below plan are blamed on successful competitor activity; are you certain that short supply in week two wasn't a bigger factor?
  • Your own promotions cannibalise sales from your other products and you waste inventory as a result!

When we don't understand the nature of past demand, we are liable to make poor decisions about the future:

  • Failing to account for supply issues when analysing past promotional performance risks underestimating demand and guarantees stockouts in future activity
  • Simplistic forecasts simply don't reflect subtle, or significant, shifts in demand - in an uncertain world this lack of transparency results in a significant risk of under-performance
  • Poorly informed decision-makers invest huge sums in production, promotion and positioning only to be surprised by weak results

In short, sales do not equal demand. You only ever see what was achieved, not what could have been achieved if you and your retail customers had truly met shopper demand.

What if each of your products had a digital twin which recognised not only the sales you achieved but all of the demand drivers affecting those sales?

  • The variations over time from seasonality and special events
  • The effects of poor availability through production and supply chain issues
  • The impact of promotional cycles, including the cannibalising effect of your - and your competitor's - promotions

With all of these separated-but-related components in play, not only could you replay the performance you achieved but also explore what true demand might look like under different conditions by adjusting the scale and weight of each component. You could replay an infinite number of possible pasts so that you better understand your probable future.

Welcome to SKUtrak TruDemand.

SKUtrak models the complex interactions between your products' major demand factors using your trading data. It explains changes in sales volume over time in terms of base demand and a collection of component drivers then recombines these components into a high-definition picture of the shopper demand that you met where each component can be highlighted, ignored or adjusted.

SKUtrak TruDemand drivers allow you to explore and understand both the demand for your products that you met successfully through your retail customers and why that demand varied from its baseline, where it wasn't fully met and how to prepare for future demand changes so that you can better match supply.

SKUtrak kind of saved the day with one of our retailers. Probably, if we hadn't of had it, I suspect whilst we would have been up year on year it might have been 6 or 8%. What we were able to identify is where we needed to get the stock to, in order to get the supply chain right. As a result of that, over the 12 weeks of summer, we increased sales with that particular retailer by 22%.

A BEER WINE & SPIRITS (BWS) SKUtrak CUSTOMER

Watch the video:
Thatcher's Case Study

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Getting attention from your buyer can be tough. Through the use of SKUtrak Thatcher's Cider did just that and learnt how they could improve their retail sales.

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How can SKUtrak help my business?

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See how SKUtrak can help to make sure you achieve 'right product, right place, right time'

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Field marketing is not the only solution...

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True insight can only come once you get all the context in one place to tell a story.

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What is meant by a forecast?

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In an ideal world all suppliers would not only receive data which can accurately forecast their demand....

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