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ToolsGroup, Retail Velocity Partner for POS Demand Sensing

12/9/2015
ToolsGroup and Retail Velocity announce that they have signed a partnership to bring together Retail Velocity's Demand Signal Repository (DSR) with ToolsGroup's Demand Sensing analytics. The partnership is expected to open up Point of Sale (POS) demand sensing performance breakthroughs to a wide range of retailers, manufacturers and distributors that previously lacked access to near real-time POS data.

Key expected benefits available through the new solution are:

    -B2C and B2B manufacturers and distributors can now acquire data across their retail distribution network, bringing demand connectivity to companies previously one step removed from this data
    -Retailers can now use POS data to optimize Vendor Managed Inventories (VMI) across a wide range of their suppliers

Sensing demand using downstream data (such as POS, store and DC inventories and promotions) generates major improvements in forecast accuracy and inventory optimization. To illustrate, ToolsGroup customer and vertically integrated retailer Amplifon (known by its brand Miracle Ear), recently deployed POS Demand Sensing to reduce inventory levels by 18 percent and inventory obsolescence by 40 percent. ToolsGroup customers with captive or a few closely connected retail networks have achieved similar results in industries such as coffee, cosmetics and mobile phone retailing.

The gap in the marketplace exists where data is required from many disparate retail networks. ERP systems usually cannot access nor maintain the data at the highly disaggregated level required for demand analytics. Nor can they cleanse and harmonize the POS data across all retail networks consistently. Retail Velocity and ToolsGroup solve this problem by incorporating the VELOCITY DSR into ToolsGroup's SO99+ POS Demand Sensing platform to allow businesses to sense demand across multiple retailers and plan within a single model. The DSR cleanses and harmonizes retail POS, inventories and DC shipments, and integrates this data seamlessly within the SO99+ platform.

"Taking advantage of data at the point of consumption to achieve near-real-time representation of consumer behavior leads to performance improvements and enhanced supply chain inventory optimization," says James Cooke, principal Analyst at Nucleus Research.

The joint ToolsGroup and Retail Velocity solution is available now through both ToolsGroup and Retail Velocity.
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