World Kitchen Finds Right Recipe for Demand Intelligence

As Bakeware Category Manager - Target for World Kitchen LLC, JoAnn DeBey was faced with challenges related to time -- specifically, not having enough of it. She'd spend hours sifting through spreadsheets of fresh data on a weekly basis, expected to provide Monday insights to her internal and external audiences that would help build brand and category volume throughout the rest of the week.

 

"I'm category manager for a long-term category -- one that has a multi-year sales cycle. Brand loyalty is a critical component of this category and it's my responsibility to provide 'short-term', weekly opportunities to grow this long-term brand loyalty," she notes. "It's a complex category. Because this category has such a long sales cycle, you have to be able to drill down into the specifics of promotional events to truly determine why or why not the event was successful in order to see if a brand needs to improve a product, replace the product or rethink their promotional strategy. It's critical to growing volume in this category."

 

In addition, notes DeBey, "The complexity of the category is compounded by the fact that our company looks at things differently than Target -- we have our own categories that help us drill down into the specifics of the product. For glassware alone we have six different subclasses. Target doesn't."

 

After having heard positive reviews of LumiData's SOLYS from others in the industry, DeBey reviewed the product and signed on.

 

"SOLYS has cut the time I spend analyzing demand data in half -- so I can spend more time drilling down into the demand specifics that get at the heart of the matter. I love that I can create my own subclass attributes and look at long-term and recent promotional events in very fine detail. Because I can analyze demand data and create reports in the World Kitchen language and Target language, it helps build communication internally and externally. I can build a sales case for both my audiences in a language each can understand."

 

DeBey provides weekly internal point-of-sale reports for World Kitchen executives as well as Target team brand, sales, marketing, forecasting and replenishment managers. She also provides category scorecards, planograms, in-stock tracking and event lift reports to her Target buyer.

 

"I provide my buyer with a series of reports that make the case for my planogram. I illustrate productivity and ranking of items, monthly item rankings, productivity by brand and total SKUs. I can show the buyer which items are the top and bottom performers across a wide range of time segments. With SOLYS, I can create reports that show trends over multiple weeks and look across multiple time frames to aptly illustrate trends that make a strong business case," she adds. "The category scorecard is the core of my presentation. We can look at the entire department by subclass and brand. I run the same report on a monthly basis, and compare it to the weekly and year-to-date trends. In this way, we can see what manufacturer has the most share and what's driving the most growth."

Because DeBey can customize the sub segments of the category, she can "illustrate what's driving our business by sub segments. If, overall, glass is performing well but there's a problem in the storage glass subsection, I can then zero in on a specific product's performance. I can determine if the subsection is down overall, or if it is a specific brand. Then I can ask questions and get answers -- 'Is it seasonality or a poor promotion? Do we need to reassess price? Improve the product? Promote the product within a different timeframe?'"

 

One of the most critical aspects of category management is the analysis of promotions. "With SOLYS I can dig deeper into how promotions perform -- by item for all brands. We can see which items are driving business, or which might need a temporary price cut. Because SOLYS allows me to track long-term changes I was able to identify that consumers will react to a minimal price reduction in glassware. On the other hand, I found that ceramics need to reach a lower price point in order to garner notice by consumers. By looking at data over the past two years, I was able to provide fact-based reports that help optimize promotional price points for the category."

 

Further, DeBey utilizes SOLYS to create an inventory matrix and look at overall weeks of supply by subclass to see if any are low or high. By listing the top five items, the lowest five in stocks, lowest five weeks of supply and bottom sellers, she can, "identify where we may need to lookat supply and address in stock problems."

 

"We need to give number crunchers a lifeline. When retail teams are using different means to analyze demand data, there's more potential for miscommunication internally -- we need to come by our stats by the same method, says DeBey. And there's more potential for error in crunching numbers the old way as compared to using SOLYS. World Kitchen wants all teams to provide the same quality information that I do. They want everyone across the company to be able to run and view the same reports -- and that's what we're exploring now."