Profimetrics – Intelligent Profit Optimisation
Profimetrics is a retail optimisation solution based on the principle of “active intelligence”. At its broadest it can optimise the performance of any retail business through better Product Life Cycle Management. It has three key applications:
- Price Management and Optimisation
- Promotions Management and Optimisation
- Stock, Sell-through Optimisation and Markdown Management
Maximising Profits
Most retailers work on averages. They cannot manage or optimise the behaviour of every product in every store every day. So consequently they have to work on averages. They deal with average markdowns, an average promotion like 30% off, average levels of stock based on average grades etc. Often these averages are applied indiscriminately across all stores or all grades of stores, even thought the stores may have very different profiles and personalities.
If you are working on averages, you are probably throwing away money.
Profimetrics moves you away from averages. Its ‘active intelligence’ technology monitors the performance of every product in every store every day, allowing you to deal with each product in each store in an optimum way.
It ensures you can optimise price, promotions and markdowns and the levels of stock in a controlled environment so that you maximise sell-through levels, maximising the level of cash margin you can earn from turning your stock.
Active Intelligence
Profimetrics is different from business intelligence systems. With business intelligence systems, you are meant to analyse and mine the data that you have, to gather intelligence from it and then come to conclusions and recommendations.
Profimetrics works differently. It is like a trading system. It mines the data for you looking for “alerts” and “recommendations”.
At its heart is a powerful rules engine where it looks for patterns, KPI’s and thresholds, which tell it that attention is needed for a particular product in a particular store or zone.
By being “active” nothing can slip through the net. By working on “exceptions”, it means the business does not have to pour over voluminous analyses of data, trying to spot anomalies, and lastly by only highlighting exceptions it drives up buying and merchandising productivity.
Benefits
Most of the clients who use it tell us that they have achieved pay back within months. In a controlled trial, we saw a profit uplift of over 3%.
Our own estimates tell us that we would be disappointed if we cannot demonstrate between 1-5% improvements in gross margin contributions.
In addition, because of active intelligence and an alerts and recommendation based system, Profimetrics dramatically increases buyer and merchandiser productivity. That means there is an opportunity to deal with larger ranges or opportunities to reduce costs in keeping with productivity improvements
