DemandTec

DemandBetter 2008, April 22-24

Our sixth annual customer conference

The DemandBetter Customer Conference, held in San Francisco April 22-24, 2008, was by far the best attended and had the highest quality content of any user group meeting to date with an exciting agenda. The retail and consumer products customers that attended were showered with the most up-to-date information on best practices for next-generation category management and merchandising, and heard standing-room only speeches from industry leaders.

General Sessions

DemandTec CEO Dan Fishback, kicked off the event and gave an energetic update on the company and its products. He established the themes of efficiency and driving ROI utility for the three-day event.

Next, Bill Phelps, Executive Vice President & Chief Customer Officer declared this the Year of the Customer and expanded on the themes mentioned by Fishback.

Vice President of Product Marketing Marc Dietz concluded the remarks by company executives by initiating the discussion of category management.

Keynote Speaker

This year’s informative keynote speaker, Dr. Brian Harris the founder of the Partnering Group, highlighted the changing nature of category management in his talk, “The Next Generation of Category Management”.

Harris discussed the use of data for examining consumer logic in the layout and assortment of the store. He said the next generation of category management will be more streamlined, more shopper centric, and more localized/customized resulting in improved store level implementation and improved speed to shelf/shelf integrity.

Customer Panel

Following the keynote, conference attendees saw presentations from customers, partners and guests including:

John Lerch, Director of Retail Strategies at Giant Food Stores, a division of Ahold USA, reported their rollout of DemandTec Price followed the use of a labor intensive pricing system that made it difficult to execute basic item relationships. In addition, the legacy application did not have forecasting capabilities and was inflexible. After installing DemandTec Price, Giant can now ensure compliance with price changes and uses far less labor in the process. The retailer is also seeing value gains from improved efficiency and effectiveness of both pricing and promotions, and an enhanced ability to forecast the impact of changes in price and promotions.

David Chesnel, Pricing Director at Groupe Casino, one of Europe’s largest retail operators with 9,850 stores in 11 countries, said his company is using DemandTec Price in its Exito (Columbia) and Monoprix (France) banners. Casino successfully moved to DemandTec after determining Monoprix and Exito needed to improve their price image and the previous system was unable to meet the challenge. The value driven by the retailer’s use of the solution includes improved forecasting that enables proactive pricing, enhanced internal processes, improved communication within the company and drastic reductions in the number of exceptions.

Chuck Eckman, Customer Vice President of Kraft Foods, who manages the Safeway relationship for the food giant, said one of the biggest challenges he faced when he came to his new position was that sales growth was anemic in many of their 600+ SKU's. By moving to the DemandTec TradePoint solution, Eckman reports that Kraft will gain efficiency in the promotion process, add visibility and access to information throughout the supply chain, and reduce or eliminate several manual processes. The company is also leveraging the strategic capabilities of DemandTec’s solution to improve pricing and promotion collaboration, enhance the annual business planning sessions, improve breakthrough business planning and quickly receive and act on consumer insight.

Industry Analyst Presentations

Also addressing DemandBetter attendees were industry analysts Scott Langdoc of IDC Global Retail Insights, and Mike Griswold and Lora Cecere of AMR Research. Langdoc discussed the growing importance of demand modeling for retailers, suggesting that psycho-graphic and other consumer data are already being used by the more innovative companies. He added that retailers bringing demand intelligence to their pricing calculations are seeing 3.5% gross margin improvements and sales lift of 2% to 4%.

From AMR, Griswold discussed Aligning Assortment, Space, Price and Promotion, while Cecere presented Trade Promotion Effectiveness at the Shelf: A Shareholder Perspective.

Mike Griswold recently wrote about the conference the AMR Research Retail Notes for May 2008:

"What makes for a successful user conference in the software industry? Strong industry perspectives, standing-room-only user breakout sessions, and collaborative roadmap discussions are a good start…you’ve just described DemandTec’s sixth annual user conference… With functionality and a platform connecting suppliers, retailers, and an impressive Tier 1 client base, including Ahold USA, Groupe Casino, and Kraft Foods, DemandTec’s value proposition is impressive. "

Click here to read the full version of Mike Griswold’s recap of DemandBetter 2008 (AMR subscription is required.)

Breakout Sessions

Customers were able to participate in breakout sessions that addressed focused areas of merchandising and marketing optimization:

• Driving Pricing Success in a Dynamic Marketplace Using Everyday Price Optimization and Everyday Price Management
• Best Practices Using Markdown Optimization
• Best Practices Using Promotion Planning and Optimization
• Best Practices and Tips Using Everyday Price Optimizations and Everyday Price Management
• Pricing Strategy in an Uncertain Economic Environment
• Best Practices for Promotion Planning and Management
• Shelf-Centered Collaboration: Shoppers are Demand(ing) Better, What Are You Doing About It
• From Segmentation to Strategy to Execution

At DemandBetter, customers learned about new innovations and advancements in assortment planning, space allocation, loyalty marketing and inventory management and replenishment as part of its strategy for integrated price, promotion and markdown optimization software services.

DemandTec’s product strategy includes providing customers with a single analytical foundation to model and analyze POS data, loyalty card data, various market data sources and other information; full integration of pricing, promotion, assortment, space and loyalty marketing optimization and retailer-defined online collaboration between retailers and their suppliers.

“The definition of this comprehensive strategy is the direct result of the long-term relationships we’ve built with our industry-leading customers,” said Fishback. “These customers are leaders in their respective markets and together we are creating unique and powerful capabilities to help them fundamentally change the way they compete and differentiate themselves in their markets.”

DemandBetter 2008 was sponsored by DemandTec strategic partners including; Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton and Precima (a member Alliance Data Systems group of companies).