Successful store promotions are key to a retailer's profitability; businesses are challenged to ensure that event executions are flawless, print media is accurate and merchandise is placed and priced correctly. Campaign development is often an imprecise science: multiple departments are often involved, much of the effort is manual and error-prone, and frequently events do not align with financial plans and objectives. In addition, the need for multiple roll-outs targeting specific markets or regions adds another layer of complexity for retailers.
"As retailers navigate a volatile economy, they are reviewing their pricing and promotion strategies from their shopper's perspective," said Paula Rosenblum, managing partner, RSR Research. "From this effort, retailers around the world are lifting their companies' overall awareness and understanding of price and promotion planning, management and optimization. This effort requires insight into what has worked well in the past, as well as the efficiency to act quickly and accurately, and the flexibility to execute creative campaigns that attract and retain shoppers."
SAP Promotion Management for Retail is planned to be a flexible solution that will support retailers in:
- Improving productivity and reducing the time required to execute on any changes through better collaboration among marketing, merchandising and advertising execution groups;
- Streamlining promotions and using resources more efficiently;
- Enabling the creation of relevant, timely and targeted advertising by product, category and zone through ad-versioning functionality;
- Helping retailers better understand the financial performance of each promotional event to more efficiently use promotional dollars;
- Lowering promotional costs by reducing the time required to produce advertisements, as well as the number of proofs to print and review.
Designed to be scalable software that will span the major retail channels - from food and drug to grocery to fashion, SAP Promotion Management For Retail is planned to be available as a stand-alone application or integrated with SAP® Business Suite software. SAP Promotion Management for Retail, together with the SAP® Price Optimization for Retail and SAP® Markdown Optimization for Retail packages, is intended to help enable retailers to optimally manage the pricing of their products throughout the entire product lifecycle.
As modular software, the application will be able to be implemented quickly to address critical business issues that many retailers face today. Not only will it enable development and execution of promotional plans, it will allow for last-minute changes to a promotional schedule in response to changing shopper trends and market conditions.
"Retailers need to achieve bottom-line savings and top-line growth by streamlining their promotion and pricing processes now," said Verlin Youd, senior vice president, Global Trading Industries, SAP AG. "With SAP Promotion Management for Retail, these activities are handled on one integrated platform, helping retailers produce shopper- and market-relevant promotions faster and more profitably."