Retail and Sales Optimization

Overview

Marketing and selling consumer products through traditional bricks and mortar, direct through catalogs and e-commerce channels should be a simple proposition: "Understand what the consumer wants, make it available and sell it at a profitable price."

But today's marketplace is more complex than ever. Consumers have unprecedented choice of retailers, channels and products. And manufactures and retailers are aggressively investing in products and stores, space, offerings, competitive pricing, marketing and services. Yet for some manufacturers and retailers, these investments do not translate into the desired results. In fact, "more" often leads to "less" when it comes to profit.

More than ever, these companies need to accelerate growth and profitability to grow shareholder value. Axafina believes the largest untapped opportunity for consumer products manufactures and retailers lies in transforming space and assortment practices. Through our approach, companies have achieved profit increases of 10 percent or more on some categories. And they've gained deep customer insights that power better marketing, pricing, and promotion.

Why Axafina

Axafina helps manufacturers and retailers deliver sustainable improvements through space and assortment optimization. We guide companies on a coordinated journey that encompasses people, processes and technology. We ensure that relevant measures and controls are in place; join end-to-end processes and responsibilities; and support these changes with the appropriate technology, decision-support aids and personnel training. Axafina works with clients as a proactive partner, helping identify opportunities in space and assortment as well as all other aspects of customer-centric demand generation and business operations. Our combination of industry expertise, business functional expertise and capabilities, helps deliver:

• The right strategies to deliver customer-centric space and assortment and to drive high levels of performance.
• A business case based on forward-looking analysis of retailer's space and assortment improvement opportunities.
• Proprietary process and analytics delivered through robust scalable tools that harnesses consumer-centric behavior to predict the incremental value of assortment and space on demand.
• Store-level pilots to quantify the benefits in the business case and to prove that those benefits are achievable in practice.
• An effective and tailored solution balancing requirements for costs, operational simplicity and business benefits.
• A business change to ensure benefits is delivered and sustainable by building customer-centric insights and more analytical space and assortment capabilities.

Services

The Axafina solution provides scientific methods and sophisticated analytics that address both product assortments and shelf space in a single solution. The solution combines a focus on attribute-based demand with detailed item profitability. This combination helps companies identify and make available products that meet the greatest needs for customers—more profitably.

With the solution, manufacturers and retailers are able to see beyond the obvious data and uncover inefficiencies that are not easily detected with commercially available tools and processes. You gain unique and meaningful insights into customer behavior and automated recommendations to sharpen customer focus and more efficiently deliver on customer demand and improve operating profit.

Axafina's demand optimization solutions provides executives and key decision makers with the processes and tools they need to address critical issues related to assortment and space.

What the Axafina portfolio of solutions can help you achieve:

• Understanding What Motivates Customer Demand—How are customers responding to different product attributes based on their relative importance to buying decisions? How can we view demand beyond just our current SKUs to more accurately describe the drivers of demand? What is the relative importance of a given product to our most loyal customers?
• Predicting Future Demand—What would be the incremental volume impact to a given category or portfolio if we added or deleted an SKU? Would we be likely to experience "product cannibalization"? What is the impact of new items? What are the new item opportunities that will deliver true incremental performance?
• Managing Cost to Meet Demand—How can we better understand the total cost to serve to project the impact of changes in assortment and space decisions on enterprise profit? How do we select from a broad array of assortment options that meet demand in a more profitable way?
• Managing Space to Serve Demand—How much space should items, categories and departments have to support the proper assortment? What is better, more space and inventory to lower replenishment costs or less inventory more frequently replenished? What category do I remove space from, what category do I add to, to maximize total store productivity?
• Aligning Demand Investment Decisions with Strategic Objectives—How can we achieve volume goals for brands, products and categories critical to generating incremental consumer transactions? How can we achieve profit goals from categories less critical to brand, portfolio and store performance but important to enterprise profit? How can we increase customer retention from categories core to loyal customer requirements and reasons to buy?