Integrated Forecasting and Retail Demand Intelligence
By: Todd P. Michaud, President and CEO, Revionics, Inc.
As we look at the retail market, we see most retailers plagued with either inadequate Retail Demand Intelligence (RDI) and Forecasting tools or on the contrary, some retailers have too many disparate systems that contradict each other. This is even true for those retailers who have selected comprehensive solution portfolios from the largest of software vendors since so many software vendors have merely intellectual property that they have acquired through poorly architected interfaces.
The market is ready for an open, integrated forecasting solution provider that has the expertise, willingness and I/P to synthesize these disparate systems. As you probably are aware, today Revionics offers Full Life Cycle Price Optimization and we are in the process of readying our the release our Inventory Replenishment Optimization solution prior to the end of the year. All of these capabilities will be based on our fully integrated forecasting and RDI platform.
Despite the breadth and depth that we expect of our own solution portfolio, we know that all retailers will have other solutions already installed that we will need to integrate with. In essence, our forecasting platform needs to become the glue that unifies the disparate solutions together. We have architected our Integrated Forecasting capabilities in this fashion. In this environment, there are many demand influencing factors that we must account for such as…
• The influence of Price, Promotion and Markdown
• The influence of Introductions and Discontinuation
• The influence of Supply or Demand Shock (Product Availability)
• The influence of Seasonality and Holidays
• The influence of Cross Effects (Affinity, Cannibalization, & Pantry Loading)
• The influence of Space
• The influence of Weather
Candidly, many of the solution providers in the retail segment simply can’t effectively do these things. They can’t integrate with upstream or downstream solutions by other software providers. Consequently, we have decided to differentiate Revionics on the basis of open scientific and analytical capabilities. We do not believe that retailers will want to settle for large, monolithic software portfolios if it is at the expense of best of breed and competitive advantage functionality.