Consultancy
Our consulting team helps clients to understand complex commercial problems and identify appropriate solutions - using visual analytics first to explore and analyse the facts, and then present compelling, easily absorbed insights that enable you to determine specific actions and measure their effect on your organisation.
Our background in grocery retail and fast moving consumer goods ("FMCG") has helped us amass a broad range of visual analytics appropriate to challenges present in those sectors, but our recent history has shown that the techniques involved can be applied to an increasingly broad range of commercial situations. Our method is consistent in all cases, and summarised in our phrase Organise, Analyse, Utilise.
The specialisms below apply principally to retail and FMCG requirements, but we welcome diversity and are always keen to consider interesting challenges in new areas: please contact us if you would like to discuss how visual analytics might be applied to your world to address your commercial challenges.
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SKU visibility
Many businesses find it difficult to make effective fact-based decisions at a detail level – for example, selecting, developing and promoting products based not just on sales value/units, but also profitability and/or stock risk of every product variant or stock-keeping unit ("SKU"); such information is often only ever calculated at department or category level, weeks or months after transactions took place.
Increasing the visibility of key measures, and making them available to all decision-makers in real-time, helps to reduce potential risks and take advantage of developing opportunities.
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Range and Space
Traditionally, range and space reviews are infrequent activities - commonly conducted once or twice a year - due to the complexity of the data involved; typically tens of thousands of product lines. Weekly reporting, by category or subcategory, masks the performance of individual lines and hides a multitude of range and space sins which are directly contradictory to hard-fought plans.
Visual analytics offers a wealth of line-level insight into product, sales, space, stock and margin performance; opening up dynamic range and space planning and monitoring; measure weekly performance against range and space plans with less effort than category-level spreadsheets.
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Own Label expansion
Own-label products remain a key tool for most retailers in managing the image of their brand, and controlling the profit and sales mix, but effective own-label execution can prove challenging. Own-label products often have to fight for space alongside their branded equivalents, and internal conflicts can arise when buyers and merchandisers feel that own-label products conflict with their space / promotional requirements.
Presenting rich, complete commercial information - on both own-label and branded products - enables buyers to make informed decisions and understand that strong own-label participation can help to improve category performance.
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Promotional efficacy
Retailers are spending ever greater proportions of revenue on promotional activity, but many struggle to monitor whether this spend actually meets its objectives. Efficacy is the capacity to produce an effect; promotional efficacy analysis, therefore, focuses on whether promotional strategy and tactics create the desired effect.
Analysing competing promotional mechanics, timings, approaches and durations - and exploring side-effects including halo sales and cannibalisation - sheds light on this increasingly important aspect of modern retail.
