Assortment Foresight™

The Assortment Foresight™ application provides a streamlined approach to analyzing product assortment and recommending changes for optimization.

What questions can Assortment Foresight™ help me answer?

• How is my category growing compared to the market place?
• What else is carried in the market?
• Should I be carrying more or less items in my assortment?
• What items should I be carrying?
• How will new products rank within my assortment?
• What impact will those changes make to my category?

The Basic Functions of Assortment Foresight™

• Assortment Foresight™ integrates A. C. Nielsen sales data for your account and comparative market in order to recommend an optimized assortment for your category and segments.
• Analysis tools allow you to consider your Target Market Coverage for each segment.
  • Assortment Foresight™ recommends adding items that fall within that Target that your account does not carry.
  • Items for review are determined by those items falling outside your Target that you do carry but are not adding significant value to your assortment.

The Advanced Functions of Assortment Foresight™

• Third Party Data
  • Enables you to import sales data and segmentation from 3rd party source like ACNielsen or Retailer internal data. This data can be imported from either a CSV template (POS file) or any common space management software format (POG file).
• Custom Segmentation
  • In addition to importing segmentation in a POS or POG file, custom segments can be created to reflect how your account analyzes categories or segments.
• Pre-Priced Product Groups
  • Assortment Foresight™ allows very similar products to be cumed into one line item. For instance, one item may have several pre-priced packages with different UPC codes, yet are essentially the same product. This feature allows you to combine these items to appear as one item.
• New Products
  • Even if items are not yet being reported in ACNielsen, (perhaps because it is too new), you can create new products and enter estimated volume to see where they will rank in your assortment.
• Private Label Analysis
  • Assortment Foresight™ allows your assortment to include Private Label items, exclude them or to "shield" them from Add/Review recommendations according to how the retailer views them.
  • Private Label items are always tagged within the assortment worksheet to bring attention to them.
  • Assortment Foresight™ also allows your assortment to match up the reportable and transactional UPC in order to pull in data from ACNielsen.

Assortment Foresight™ brings a portfolio of tools to help analyze your category.

• Formatted and easy-to-read reports include: The Category Movement Report, Category Overview, Assortment Worksheet, Add and Review Recap and the Impact of Proposed Assortment changes.
• Other tools include ranking reports that can integrate space management measures, ranking by manufacturer, Sub-segment, Quartile, or Product.
• Visual charts to illustrate category growth, category share and quartiles.

Contact your local Kraft Category Analyst or Category Insights Manager for more information and demonstration of how Assortment Foresight™ can help you solve assortment optimization issues.