A leading Apparel company increased sales by leveraging POS data to proactively address market needs and shifting consumer behavior

A leading Apparel company turned to Applexus to develop an approach to assess their performance and strategize their sales efforts. The client lacked a holistic view of their analytics landscape and data available to drive key insights that were instrumental to decision-making. Applexus partnered with them to diagnose their current state and help them actualize their future expectations.

Challenges

With a lack of insights into retail sales, our client was not responsive enough to the ever-so-changing consumer behavior and market forces. This led to more reactive actions (rather than proactive) to address the challenges or find new opportunities.

• Weekly pricing and promotions data was captured manually and reported through excel sheets, leading to a delay in analyzing the data. Significant time was spent on data consolidation which made the process not only inefficient but also error prone.
• As the market shifted rapidly, our client was not responsive enough to react judiciously. Analysis was often conducted as a monthly routine or on an ad-hoc basis, leaving room for guesswork in the decision-making process.
• Existing analytics capabilities and platforms were not adequate to analyze the causality behind the POS trends. This hindered the ability to strategize and plan further actions based on historical data and current trends.

Solution

Applexus engaged with the client to consolidate different streams of data and transform them into visuals through dashboards. Various KPIs were also tracked and monitored through the dashboard with alerts and recommendations to assist business users in decision-making.

• Data was acquired from NPD to combine weekly POS and store-level sales data. Information such as sales in terms of volume and dollar amount, product SKUs, pack size attributes, etc was captured and consolidated in a unified platform.
• Various key metrics were calculated and derived from store level POS data, pricing data, sales volume data, etc. Business users were empowered to investigate the data at the granularity of store level, product category, pack size & attributes, etc every week.
• Pricing variation data were analyzed for all the products to identify the fastest and slowest-selling products. This helped in instituting benchmarks for product and customer segments.

Results

Implementing these solutions helped our client become more proactive to address market needs and shifting consumer behavior. With data and insights consumed through a unified platform, it was easier to identify and mitigate risk while spotting new opportunities. An effective benchmarking also provided key insights about the performance of product segments and the competitive landscape. They achieved holistic visibility on their sales statistics to drive more focused sales efforts which ultimately translated into more top-line growth.