Leveraging Location for Better Decisions
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Leveraging Location for Better Decisions

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AWhere CPG Vision

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From Insight to Action with Wal-Mart Retail Link® Data

The Location Intelligent Solution for the CPG Industry

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) is a fast paced, highly competitive industry representing $2.1 Trillion of business in the United States. Several thousand manufacturers compete for attention and prominent shelf-space in 34,000 grocery and retail outlets across the country. It is not a trivial task to keep track of the changing consumer trends and demands across such a broad geography and to ensure that products are priced right, in stock, and in demand.

AWhere has introduced the AWhere CPG Vision™ data visualization system to convert this problem into opportunity for CPG category managers and analysts. AWhere is known for their easy-to-use desktop and online mapping software and “GIS for the rest of us” attitude placing the power of geo-analytics under the fingertips of sales and marketing professionals that don’t have the time nor desire to learn complex technology products.

Wal-Mart and Weather Data

The animated weather map below shows a storm system blowing across the MidWest for 4 days, then shows with Wal-Mart stores (highlighted in yellow) that will experience at least 5mm of rain for 3 days in a row at the end of the week.

Key Advantages of AWhere CPG Vision

From Insight to Action

The instant you take Point-of-Sales (POS) data out of the spreadsheet and onto a map… insight starts happening. Our minds process visual patterns 60,000 times faster than we can see the same in tabular lists. But that’s no shock. What is surprising is to see clusters of success and pockets of under performance leap into view within seconds of a sales map being painted.

For example take a glance at this Texas map showing a juice brand’s year-over-year change in sales across a convenience store chain. It doesn’t take long to see that things are good in the plains, but hurting in downtown Dallas, Houston and El Paso. With that picture in mind, it also didn’t take long to find out that a competitor had moved into these three locales and taken away prime shelf-space. It also didn’t take long to get back in the game with that insight in hand. Insight to action: That’s what AWhere CPG Vision is all about.

Visualize Wal-Mart Retail Link Data

If you sell products through Wal-Mart, then you already understand the power of the data you can access with Retail Link, Wal-Mart’s online POS access system. The problem is trying to get a handle on 20 different sales parameters describing a dozen different SKUs being sold at 3800 store locations… well, you get the picture. Rather, CPG Vision gives you the picture.

Our OneTouch Wizard™ for Retail Link converts that massive spreadsheet into a colorful map that you can quickly visualize and compare product sales by store and by market. Which stores are your strongest? Which are you weakest? Who is under- and over-achieving in each of your markets. These questions will be answered faster than you can ask them.

Visualize Performance & Opportunity

The AWhere CPG Vision solution includes more than 100 variables of 2008 demographic data pre-aggregated to state, county, zip code, DMA markets and Wal-Mart stores. Quickly see which Wal-Mart stores are in close proximity to your target audience. And quickly see which of those stores are under- or over-performing. You can also visualize your product sales by store indexed within each of the 210 Nielsen or 65 IRI markets.

If you purchase IRI, Nielsen or SPINS market data, AWhere CPG Vision is enabled and ready to display that data side-by-side with your POS data. After viewing your information on AWhere maps, it will be hard to go back to spreadsheets alone again.

Visualize Out-of-Stocks

Patterns of out-of-stock can easily be seen on a CPG Vision map. Often this pictorial view will beg new questions and reveal issues in distribution. By mapping days-on-hand inventory, you will quickly pinpoint opportunities of overstock in proximity to under-stock for optimizing balance.

Visualize the Impact of Weather

If the demand for your product changes by hot, cold, wet, or dry weather changes, CPG Vision has a capability you’ve never experienced. AWhere maintains a tremendous weather history and forecasting database and makes available a 10-day history and 10-day forecast every morning. Each day’s weather data can be viewed as a national weather map like you see on TV, and is pre-assigned to every Wal-Mart store as well. You are only a few click’s away from highlighting all the stores in the country that will have unusually spells of weather in the coming 10 days. The adjoining map shows three clusters of Wal-Marts that will have 3 days of rain in a row the following week. Another click shows your inventory and days-on-hand at each of these stores. Your competition? Still worried about something else… like the loss in sales they experienced last week when you beat them to the punch again.

Got Data? We’ve got Maps

AWhere blog

Read our blog posts for more commentary.

Pricing Questions?

Pricing for CPG Vision depends on the number of users in a firm. Pricing starts at less than $3000 per year per user for groups of 10 or more. For more information please contact us.

Disclaimer: AWhere is not affiliated nor endorsed by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Wal-Mart and Retail Link are trademarks of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Features

OneTouch Wizard

De-pivots the pivot table.
Allows you to look at all important product performance indicators at the store level (Year-over-Year change of sales, out-of-stocks, product velocity, performance indexed to the national and market areas) without having your mind blown with 3800 lines of store IDs. Everything in a visual, familiar context of markets.

Trade Area Characterization of every individual store

AWhere profiles each store by the demographics of the households that are likely to visit that store. Ethnic, age, income and spending power variables are available.
This provides a VERY affordable approach for planning product launches or understanding why products are over-performing in some and under-performing in other stores... for manufacturers that can't afford detailed analysis by IRI or Nielsen. Albeit, the CPG Vision platform also provides a great way to get MORE value out of IRI or Nielsen dataset purchases.

Impact of Weather

The daily 10-day forecast of temperature and precipitation allows a manufacturer to see which stores will be impacted by weather conditions while visualizing inventory levels at affected stores and Wal-Mart DCs (distribution centers). If your product sales are affected by unusually hot or cool weather, or are spiked in wet or snowy environs, such visualizations can give you a HUGE leg up on competitive opportunities.

Pre-supplied mapping layers for State, County, Zip, DMAs and Stores

AWhere CPG Vision provides pre-built mapping layers for the above entities. CPG Vision includes demographic data, weather data, and creates Wal-Mart POS performance maps with these layers. CPG Vision customers can also use these built-in layers to import their own data from other sources or data purchased from IRI, Nielsen, SPINS or other consumer trending services.

AWhere and its map-centric view of business data allows you to compare census data collected at the block group, POS data acquired at the store level, Scan-Data collected at the Zip Code level, and consumer trend data collected at the Market Level.

Key Benefits of CPG Vision which go straight to the bottom line

Minimizing out-of-stocks

There is nothing worse than not having stock on the shelves. ESPECIALLY in the middle of a regional promotion. CPG Vision makes it easy to see inventory levels and be confident in days-on-hand stock at the regional and individual store level when planning a promotion or faced with a weather challenge (read "opportunity"). This contributes directly to bottom line margins.

Optimizing product mix

A popular concept today is clustering: Locating stores that share a common demographic or selling profile. These clusters may or may not be geographically centric, but CPG Vision is a perfect method for visualizing the location of these clusters and "clustering the clusters" into geographies to ensure that there is a distribution method to economically distribute proper product mixes to like stores. Also, CPG Vision allows the category manager to quickly view actual product mix sales by store and by market... and index this to optimal mixes. Overall, optimizing product mix maximizes margin and incremental revenue.

Leveraging Weather opportunity

Having a simple, visual method of seeing the potential impact of weather systems across a retail chain can provide additional opportunity to increase revenues and margin.. and often at the direct expense of less prepared competitors.

Inventory balancing

CPG Insight provides a highly visual method of seeing days-on-hand at the store and regional level. Overstocks in close geographic proximity to under stocks are easily seen creating an opportunity for rapid incremental margin increase.

Screenshots

From Insight to Action with Wal-Mart Retail Link® Data

Download this page in PDF format
Bringing store level data to life! (PDF; 7 MB)

"The ability to see store level POS data indexed to Nielsen markets allows a Wal-Mart Category Management team to isolate over- and under-performing stores with causal information.
AWhere CPG Vision brings a 40,000 line spreadsheet to life!"

Rick Pensa, CEO of Insight, Information & Consulting Services

Bringing Store Level Data to Life

CPG Vision is a new location and market intelligence solution providing overlaid mapping of store level sales data, inventory levels, consumer demographics, and syndicated market data. CPG Vision includes a OneTouch Wizard™ that directly imports and maps data from Wal-Mart’s Retail Link® online POS application. Category Managers can immediately view product velocity and inventory across all 3600 Wal-Mart and 600 Sam’s Club stores, indexed to national and market levels.

Analyzing and quickly acting on POS data can have a profound impact on consumer product companies at both top-line revenue and bottom-line profit through:

Increased on-shelf availability
Optimized product mixes for store clusters
Planning and measuring efficacy of promotions
Identifying & eliminating inefficiencies in the supply chain

From Insight to Action

The instant you take Point-of-Sales (POS) data out of the spreadsheet and onto a map… insight starts happening. Our minds process visual patterns 60,000 times faster than tabular lists. But that’s no shock. What is surprising is to see clusters of success and pockets of under-performance leap into view within seconds of sales data being “painted” onto a map.

Year-over-year change in juice sales at a convenience store chain. Notice the drop in Dallas, Houston & El Paso.

For example, take a look at this Texas map showing a juice brand’s year-over-year change in sales across a convenience store chain. It doesn’t take long to see that things are good in the plains, but hurting in Dallas, Houston and El Paso. With that picture in mind, it didn’t take long to find out that a competitor had moved into these three urban locales and taken away prime shelf-space. It also didn’t take long to get back in the game with that insight in hand.

Geographic visualization provides fast insight into positive trends that you can exploit and fast insight into negative trends to nip in the bud.

Visualize Wal-Mart Retail Link Data

If you sell products through Wal-Mart, then you already understand the power of the data you can access with Retail Link, Wal-Mart’s online POS access system. The problem is trying to get a handle on 20 different sales parameters describing a dozen different SKUs being sold at 3600 store locations… well, you get the picture. Rather, CPG Vision gives you the picture.

Our OneTouch Wizard™ for Retail Link converts that massive spreadsheet into colorful maps that you can quickly visualize and compare product sales by store and by market. Which stores are your strongest? Which are your weakest? Which are under-performing and overperforming in each of your markets? Have you ever been able to look for high and low performers in each of the Nielsen 210 markets? At a single glance? These questions will be answered faster than you can ask them.

Store level sales indexed to market. Green stores are over-performing and red stores are under-performing.

Store Performance & Opportunities

The AWhere CPG Vision solution includes more than 100 variables of 2008 demographic data pre-aggregated to state, county, zip code, IRI InfoScan® markets, Nielsen Scantrack® and DMA® markets and Wal-Mart stores. Quickly see which Wal-Mart stores are in close proximity to your target audience and quickly see which of those stores are under- or over-performing. You can also visualize your product sales by store indexed within each of the 210 Nielsen or 65 IRI markets.

If you purchase IRI, Nielsen or SPINS market data, AWhere CPG Vision is enabled and ready to display that data sideby-side with your POS data and AWhere’s rich set of ethnic, age, and income demographic data. When you see an uptick or down-tick, CPG Vision lets you peal the layers back to find out why and take action.

After viewing your information on AWhere maps, it will be hard to go back to spreadsheets alone again.

Balancing Your Inventory

In the CPG world, “Out-of-stock” is a distasteful expression meaning “irrecoverable lost opportunity.” There is no greater business sin than running a promotion and having to hand out rain-checks or, worse yet, not even knowing you needed rain-checks. CPG Vision becomes a highresolution dashboard for nipping out-of-stocks before they happen.

In the map below, pie-charts represent store level product velocity and mix while the vertical red bars represent days out-of-stock.

This single map identified several distribution issues for an AWhere user.

Geographic visualization is a powerful technique for analyzing days-on-hand inventory before a promotion is implemented. By mapping days-on-hand with color thresholds, you will quickly pinpoint opportunities of overstock in proximity to under-stock for optimizing inventory balance contributing directly to improved margins.

Patterns of out-of-stock can easily be seen on a CPG Vision map. Often this pictorial view will beg new questions and reveal issues in distribution.

Leveraging the Impact of Weather

If demand for your product changes like the weather, maybe it’s because of the weather! CPG Vision has a capability you may have never experienced. AWhere maintains a multi-terrabyte weather history and forecasting database and makes available a 10-day history and 10-day forecast every morning to CPG Vision users. Each day’s weather data can be viewed as a national weather map like you see on TV. We also pre-assign the weather to every Wal-Mart store as well. You are only a few click’s away from highlighting all the stores in the country that will have unusual spells of weather in the coming days.

Store clusters highlighted in yellow will experience 3 or more days of rain in the next week. Blue represents rain.

The previous map shows three clusters of Wal-Marts, that will have 3 days of rain in a row the following week. Another click shows your inventory and days-on-hand at each of these stores and their DCs. Your competition? Still worried about something else… like the loss in sales they experienced last week when you beat them to the punch (again) during that unseasonal hot streak in Portland.

Finding Clusters of Clusters

One of the hot topics in category management is clustering: looking for stores that exhibit similar selling characteristics yet may or may not be in close proximity.

Due to neighborhood features, traffic flows or history, there are many situations where stores across the street from each other have very different customer profiles and buying tendencies. A store in west LA might more closely resemble a store in north Tampa than one within walking distance. Once again, opportunity to lift the bottom line!

Highlighting stores with similar customer demographics. Finding clusters of such clusters can contribute directly to the bottom line.

CPG Vision makes it easy to visualize stores with similar customer buying profiles. But just because you identify a similar set of stores, doesn’t necessarily mean the distribution logistics exist to exploit it. CPG Vision allows you to identify geographic clusters of virtual clusters allowing you to design pallet mixes and promotions that are economically feasible to implement, making all the difference between ordinary and extraordinary margins.

Plays Well with Other Data

Not only does AWhere CPG Vision come bundled with the Retail Link OneTouch Wizard, a nation full of demographic data, and daily weather forecasts... AWhere can instantly map any data you have in an Excel spreadsheet. If you have POS data from other retail chains, inventory data from your IT department, or store compliance data collected from your field sales team, AWhere can read it and display it in a blink. Now all that data starts making sense! But what about census block demographic data, zip codebased scan-data, DMA market trends, and a nationwide weather grid? How do you compare those apples with these oranges amidst the grapefruits?

AWhere CPG Vision handles it all. Import a spreadsheet of Nielsen Scantrack data. Load an IRI InfoScan market report. Now, directly compare those indicators with this week’s POS performance out of Retail Link.

CPG Vision makes it easy to spot clusters of stores with similar customer profiles in the store trade area.

Getting the Jump on Competition

At AWhere, we are huge believers in personal attention, hand-holding and getting the jump on competition. Because of Microsoft and Google Maps, millions of people have become aware of the power of digital mapping in the last 3 years. However, most of them still don’t know how to apply that power to their company data. Do you? CPG Vision comes with a two-day, onsite, live training course. That’s right. A real person. At your facility. We want to understand your business, get to know your IT resources and make you successful, immediately. After all, a few lead-days of insight translates into a world of hurt for competitors that “can’t see it.”

Our solution consultant will not just train your Category Management team on our product, but will train you with your data. AWhere will give you the jumpstart to integrate LI (Location Intelligence) into your BI (Business Intelligence) workflow. We also offer quarterly webinar training refreshers and tip sessions along with 1-businessday email and phone support.

A week from now, you could be looking at your data in ways your competition can only dream about.

AWhere CPG Vision includes

Wal-Mart Retail Link Import Wizard

A fully automated wizard that rips apart that 40,000 line POS Excel spreadsheet generated by your Retail Link report template. It separates your data by product grouping all the performance attributes with each. And of course it displays each performance indicator across all 3600 Wal-Marts and 600 Sam’s Clubs. The Wizard also magically indexes key performance indicators to the nation and to the market: you choose whether to index to IRI InfoScan or Nielsen Scantrack or DMA markets.

Linkable Map Layers

CPG Vision provides a series of built-in map layers that are used to render all our sales, demographic, and weather displays. You can also use these layers to link external Excel spreadsheets from your company data, syndicated reports from IRI, Nielson or SPINS, or from any Internet or 3rd party source. Linkable layers include:

US States (50)
US Counties (3141)
US Counties (3141)
Wal-Mart and Sam’s Clubs (>4200)
Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club trade areas
IRI InfoScan Markets (65)
Nielsen Scantrack Markets (52)
Nielsen DMA Markets (210)

2008 US Demographic Estimates

AWhere has teamed with a census statistics company to provide 2008 estimates of the demographic breakdown of the entire USA. We’ve pre-calculated about 100 demographic variables covering ethnicity, age breakdowns, household income, and household consumer goods spending. These 100 variables are pre-aggregated to the states, county, IRI and Nielsen Markets and down to the trade area of each individual Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club store location.

Weather Impact Forecasts

For years, AWhere has been an online weather map supplier to Farm Journal and major Agricultural companies around the world. Now, CPG Vision can access our daily 10-day history and 10-day forecast weather maps electronically via our web services. Included are history and forecasts for daily min/max temperatures, average humidity and precipitation. We also provide this same 10 day forecast pre-calculated for each Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.

Microsoft Virtual Earth

AWhere provides the business acumen. Microsoft does Windows and Streets. By itself, Virtual Earth can plot a few hundred points. With a little help from AWhere, you can visualize thousands of store locations and color themed county and zip code polygons. Anytime you wish, a single mouse-click will turn on Microsoft Virtual Earth street and satellite views under your POS and demographic displays to make sure your insights stay grounded.

The 52 Nielson Scantrack® Markets

The 65 IRI InfoScan® Markets

The 210 Nielsen DMA® Markets

US Census 2008 Demographic Estimates
AWhere CPG Vision includes market and market definitions to map data from Excel Spreadsheets against IRI InfoScan, Nielsen Scantrack and DMA markets as well as Zip Codes, Counties and States.

How Can We Help You?

If you’re intrigued about how AWhere CPG Vision can help your cause, give us a call. We would like to understand your product challenges and help you start using a new solution providing insight today… that your competition can only dream about tomorrow.

Call us at 877-355-0556 and ask for our CPG Vision Solution Specialist or visit www.awhere.com

All product specifications are subject to change. AWhere is not affiliated nor endorsed by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
All other trademarks and copyrights mentioned are the property of their respective owners.