Product Lifecycle Planning for Sales and Profits
An article in ACNielsen’s Consumer Insight publication, Competitive Pricing Intelligence, suggests that retailers use a product lifecycle planning approach to use price more effectively to drive sales and profits.
Current methods of pricing such as manual analysis and pricing execution, using reports as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or in-house developed automated systems, have drawbacks. These range from lack of efficiency (time to crunch numbers) to flexibility (failure to account for market conditions).
“Product lifecycle planning offers the ability to price throughout a product’s lifecycle to maximize sales, revenue and inventory utilization. It sets the initial price for products to identify cost and margin goals early in the product’s lifecycle. For seasonal items, optimal markdown planning utilizes markdown optimization at any stage of an item’s lifecycle, both preseason and in-season. For all of the other products, a rules-based system that manages prices by reporting exceptions to the rules is employed to manage prices to meet stated objectives.”
ACNielsen is a sponsor of RetailWire.
Moderator’s Comment: What is the most effective system
for developing a retail pricing strategy that drives sales and profits?
David Schmaier, executive vice president of products,
Siebel, shared his views on enterprise resource planning with CRMDaily.com.
“The real story is that ERP has been dead, is still dead and will be dead for
the next five years.”
[George
Anderson – Moderator]