Trade promotion is an extremely powerful tool that helps retailers and their partners winning larger market share by attracting consumers' attention and driving foot traffic to their stores. Econometric analyses prove large differences in the effectiveness of promotional tools so it becomes increasingly important to implement an optimization solution that helps sharpening promotion plans and building bigger baskets and profits, stimulate categories, and retain more of the targeted shopper segments.

A leading retail chain with over 250 stores in Hungary approached Keystone to implement mPlan solution for their Trade Promotion Optimization needs. The retailer's activities involve cooperation with over 160 suppliers, dealing with the assortment of about 15000 products, 1200 brands, and 42 categories. The trade promotion management process includes planning, budgeting, negotiating, designing and fulfilling of over 7000 promotions annually and involving about 40 employees on a daily basis.

mPlan solution

A comprehensive mPlan Trade Promotion Optimization software from Keystone was implemented at the retailer's regional head office in Hungary. The process that formerly required a lot of manual work with a large set of Excel files was automated and moved under the control of mPlan enterprise suite.

"With the help of mPlan's Dashboards, Visual Designer and Auto Allocation, the time I had to spend on creating, allocating and fine-tuning promotions to match product categories with target criteria, went down from 3 months to 3 days" said the customer representative after completion of the first annual promotion scheduling with mPlan.

Overall benefits of the mPlan implementation included:

• Complete support of management targets for trade promotion activities
• Optimization for maximum effectiveness based on category weight and their seasonal impact
• Predictive financial dashboards to assess performance of promotional activities
• Optimal promotion funding by manufacturers, balanced within budgeting and marketing constraints
• Efficiently and accurately planned promotion types, marketing tools types and their pricing
• Better supplier satisfaction through more transparent organization of marketing activities
• Easier negotiated co-marketing allowances with suppliers
• Measurable activity of category management and marketing personnel

Outcomes

By replacing the "stone-age" manual method of managing promotions, mPlan helped to shift retailer personnel's focus to core marketing activities. Planning process became much faster and data quality improved dramatically. The project resulted in a measurable increase of co-marketing revenues and greater effectiveness of promotional activities.

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