FAQS
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A demand signal is any data that indicates demand for products or services and encompasses a large set of measures that show both met and unmet demand. Understanding the principle of “met and unmet demand” is important because true demand can never be measured directly, only inferred from met (or achieved) demand plus an estimate of unmet (missed) demand.
Let’s explore this with an example:
Your local bakery makes 100 croissants in the morning before the store opens and by the end of the day has only sold 80, it knows shopper demand that day was precisely 80 croissants. If the following day, however, the bakery makes 80 - in line with demand on the previous day - and by 10.30 am has sold all of them then it has established demand for at least 80 croissants but perhaps there was some unmet demand? If the bakery were to record requests from every shopper who couldn’t find a croissant after 10.30 it would have an additional measure of unmet demand but the bakery wouldn’t know about demand from those shoppers who didn’t ask, despite wanting a croissant.
In this example, the record of shopper requests is a powerful demand signal; it increases information about the true demand for croissants on the second day although it’s still imperfect as the bakery can assume that some shoppers didn’t ask and some may have bought more than one.
Ultimately, on-shelf availability is more important to measure and understand than in-store availability – because (in most cases) shoppers can only purchase what’s available on the shelf. That said, both have a part to play; let’s explore further…
What do we mean by availability?
How can we measure availability?
What’s the difference between “on-shelf” and “in-store”?
Forecasting demand for promotional offers is notoriously difficult for consumer goods retailers and suppliers. Some promotions fail miserably whilst others wildly exceed expectations. Most, however, perform within broadly predictable bounds and ALL benefit from a dual approach to planning and execution:
- Plan realistic outcomes based on an accurate understanding of past performance
- Monitor execution attentively and react quickly to shopper response
The rest of this article will consider the first of these; how to plan realistic outcomes for your promotions.
Related articles:
Promotions generate best value for grocery suppliers when they are planned and executed as part of a long-term promotional strategy; the strategy defines the goals and metrics for promotions in terms of brand building and value generation. Promotions are, however, an inevitable collaboration between retailer and supplier, and not every retailer will be willing to participate in every part of your promotional strategy, so you need to define promotional plans with your retailer customers to meet their needs too.
Ideally, this will be in the form of a long-term ‘joint business plan’ agreed between you and your retailer customer over a 12-36 month period. If so, you can plan a programme of promotions that meet joint needs and execute each to the outline below. If not, and you are only able to plan a short-term programme of events, you should still run promotions that contribute to your own promotional strategy and it’s equally important to follow best practice.
To learn about the 7 best practice steps across the 3 stages of a promotion please read the full article here.
John Wanamaker’s famous quote about advertising rings an uncomfortable bell for many CPG commercial directors:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Substitute “promotions” for “advertising” and you’ve just described the dilemma faced by most CPGs as they allocate budget to programmes that invest across brands, customers and channels to increase shopper purchase of their products.
“Half the money I spend on promotions is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
From our work with hundreds of CPGs over the past twenty years, we have identified the seven key behaviours of the most successful revenue growth management principles that define best practices and direct promotional spending to those brands, customers, and events that generate the greatest return.
- Set goals
- Understand past performance
- Identify what works
- Experimental mindset
- Execute in partnership
- Review and challenge claims
- Plan strategically
Please read our full article here to learn more about these seven behaviours.
Introduction - be accountable
Retailers are busy, which means getting in front of buyers and supply-chain managers can be challenging. Suppliers shouldn’t leave it to chance whether the retailers are going to be fully accountable for the correct stockholding of their products. Retailers are literally managing tens of thousands of products and so tend to focus on key lines. This means it is the job of the supplier to ensure that:
- their voice gets heard amongst all of the noise and
- information can be presented in a format that is quickly and easily understood
A report by The Advantage Group examined the factors which were most important to both suppliers and retailers in terms of priorities [1]. These included delivering complete orders, building trust and being proactive.
At a glance, the above could be seen as a near impossible task given that some suppliers do not have the time or people power required. The full guide here will dispel that idea and give genuine solutions to suppliers of all sizes.
If you produce or distribute products that your target market buys through retail stores - including e-commerce retail sites - then you want to ensure that your target customers can purchase your product when they want to. Sure, your retailer customers are the immediate purchasers of your products, and you need to ensure that you can meet their demand, but ultimately they are only the pathway to your true target customers - those who will use or consume your products.
If you want to meet the needs of your end-users/consumers you must ensure that your retailer customers meet your needs.
Platform
We understand and sympathise with your frustration. It’s certainly true that you can experience a delay between a data refresh on your retailer customer portal and that same information in SKUtrak. We work hard to minimise this but it is inevitable to some degree - let’s explain why…
UK grocery retailer systems weren’t built for mass data extraction
There’s more to collecting the data… than just collecting the data
Some retailer portals experience repeated issues
You can read all about our commitment to a reliable platform here.
You can see the latest service uptime on our status page, and how this compares to the retailer portals.
- Please visit https://app.skutrak.com/ and click ‘Don’t remember your password?’
- Please enter your email address in the box provided. We will send you an email to reset your password.
- You will then receive a link to reset your password and log back into your account.
Still having issues?
- Please visit our knowledge base: https://help.skutrak.com/knowledge/ and click on the live chat icon in the right-hand corner to connect with a member of our support team.
Yes, through SKUtrak’s BluePlanner integration, SKUtrak data can be passed automatically to BluePlanner for use within the system. Contact our team should you have any specific questions on setting this up. More details on this can be found here: https://help.skutrak.com/knowledge/faqs.
We have a range of guides and tools available to help you along the way, including our Help Centre for product documentation. Please use the links below to access. Should you have any questions you can email us, but for faster responses we recommend using the Resource Center icon in the right hand corner and selecting Support Chat to chat live to a member of our team.
Getting started and dashboard guides - https://help.skutrak.com/knowledge/getting-started
Developer resources - https://docs.atheonanalytics.com/
Teams allow an organisation to restrict their users to only being able to access certain content. This is done by restricting a team to a set list of data organisations. This is accessed within the settings tab.
Please note that if a user isn't in any teams, they won't be able to view any content. By default, every organisation will have a "Global" team that has access to all services. This team will be created when the organisation is created and it cannot be modified or deleted. When creating an organisation, the creator will be added to the global team, to help avoid confusion around not being able to see any content.
If you are an account administrator, you can invite a user by clicking on the settings icon at the top and hit ‘users’ in the drop down. From here, you will be able to invite others by clicking the invite button and inserting the email, role and teams for the user you want to add.
There are no costs or limits for new users on SKUtrak.
You can login to SKUtrak via app.skutrak.com. You will need your company email address and the password you chose at registration.
You will need a free user account if you do not already have one which can be created at app.skutrak.com by using the 'sign up' option.
Please get in touch with support@skutrak.com if you encounter any issues.
Comparisons
Read our case studies to hear what our customers say about Atheon & SKUtrak.
You can also find independent reviews on us via Gartner and Glassdoor.
See also:
“Extracting data across every customer is a huge, time-consuming task. With SKUtrak, it is effortless.”
Scott Morton, Head of Customer Collaboration, Alpro
“SKUtrak’s advanced insights allow us to significantly increase availability during critical periods.”
Jimmy Coulson, Head of Supply Chain, Yoplait UK
“SKUtrak helps us to have fundamentally better conversations with our customers.”
Kelly Holman, National Account Executive, Valeo Foods Group
Hear more from our customers within our dedicated Case Studies section.
You can also check out 'Which companies use SKUtrak?'
There are hundreds of companies using SKUtrak today, from small startups to the world’s largest consumer product brands.
Hundreds of companies use the free-for-life SKUtrak Starter edition to keep an eye on recent events. SKUtrak Starter provides a summary dashboard of trading performance over the past 28 days and a daily email service that highlights delivery shortages and availability issues across the supply chain.
Over 120 companies subscribe to SKUtrak Premium plans which provide a wealth of data, analytics, dashboards and integrations to popular planning, analysis and reporting tools.
See the list in our full article here.
You can always find our customer case studies here
Analytics
Despite the prevalence of GTINs (also known as EANs, article numbers, barcodes etc.) for consumer packaged goods it’s common to find retailer trading data expressed in terms of a retailer’s own product code (article number, MIN, PIN, TPNB, TPND etc.). Matching retailer codes to your own product codes is often essential for effective and actionable product performance insights; you can’t take action if you’re not sure which product requires attention!
At its simplest, product code matching is a problem of associating the code used by a retailer with the code used by the supplier of that product. But which ‘code’ do we mean? Product code matching is complicated by different types of product codes used at different stages in the Flow-of-Goods between supplier and shopper. We explore these in the full article here.
Related articles:
Never?!
Excel remains a great tool for many reporting and analysis purposes – such as building summary reports or conducting a simple ‘what-if’ analysis of two or more scenarios. There are, however, many cases where regular Excel use may not meet all of your needs, including when:
- Your data volume exceeds what you can reasonably handle on your personal computer
- You want to analyse mixed data grain
- You need to combine data from multiple sources
- You want to provide applications to casual users
In these cases, other tools and techniques may offer more powerful, speedy and insightful analysis, including:
- Business Intelligence tools like Looker, PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, Sigma etc.
- Data platforms like BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake etc.
- Specialist grocery analysis tools like Elm, Perfect Supplier, SKUtrak, Ultralysis etc.
To explore some of these scenarios, please read our full article here.
Tracking your SKUs on their journey from the warehouse to the tills of each of your retail customers requires a few things.
- Firstly, you need to collect the raw data (preferably automating as much of the process as possible)
- Then, transform it all into a useable format (preferably a single consistent, centralised format across retailers)
- Finally, it must be presented internally and externally to make decisions that improve sales and supply. (preferably visually for active analysis rather than static reporting)
We have a few articles that might help you on this journey:
In its simplest form, analysing supermarket data is entirely free! Any supplier to the ‘Big Four’ UK supermarkets, for example, can perform useful sales analysis with nothing more than an account on each of the ‘retail portals’ and a suitable spreadsheet tool (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, for example).
Most organisations, however, will want to understand their recent performance in the context of long-term patterns and this presents a few challenges:
- Retailers tend to provide detailed data only for recent events; usually the last few weeks
- Some data (e.g. stock levels) is only presented as a daily snapshot
- Downloading all available data every day takes a long time and is impractical
The most straightforward Excel analysis tool is the PivotTable and it’s perfect for analysing time-down data. There are thousands (millions?!) of tutorials for PivotTables; when writing, searching “Excel pivot table tutorials” on Google generates over 16m results!
Whatever your start point or learning style, you can find a tutorial that works for you, with articles, videos and step-by-step training courses available online for everyone, from absolute beginners to advanced Excel users.
PivotTables can only go so far though; presenting data in tables is fine for small data sets, like monthly sales over a year, but once you want to deal with larger volumes of data, you need to be visualising your data to spot patterns.
Read the full article here.
Related questions:
Data
Here is an illustrative list of the retailer portals available and compatibility with SKUtrak:
To find out more about collecting data from these portals, please read:
What data can I collect from UK supermarkets, as a supplier?
If you are happy with infrequent high-grain data (e.g. Week x Item) then you can simply download an appropriate report from one or more retailer portal(s) every time you need it.
Running weekly reports is relatively quick and easy, although retailer portals are notoriously busy on Monday mornings and best avoided if you value your time! Many account managers will leave their weekly analysis until Monday afternoon or evening, when downloading last week’s sales report from each retailer is a little less stressful.
If you want to collect low-grain data – especially if you want to collect multiple metrics, at different levels of grain, on a daily basis – then you will probably want to automate report generation. Some of the retailer portals allow you to schedule reports that you can receive by email, others will require you to use some form of ‘software robot’ to login, run reports and download the resulting data files.
Learn about how we automate this process for our customers here.
Related questions:
All of the ‘Big Four’ provide data at the following grains (follow this link for an explanation of data grain):
- Day x Item
– aggregate store metrics (sales, waste, stock, availability etc.) - Day x Item x Depot
– depot metrics (stock, inbound service, outbound service etc.) - Week x Item
– weekly summary of combined store and depot metrics
The full list of grains is available here.
Related questions:
Pricing
There are no costs associated with user accounts on SKUtrak. An organisation can have as many user accounts connected as it requires.
Please read "How much does SKUtrak cost?" for our pricing variables.
Maybe you don’t need to? Many small businesses, with a tiny product range and only one or two salespeople, may find grocery analytics unnecessary. There’s no point paying for something you don’t need, just because leading brands do it.
It’s important, however, to distinguish between data and analytics. Many retailers provide their suppliers with some trading data free of charge; some of the largest grocers supply a huge amount of data, enabling very detailed analysis.
But data, without appropriate tools and methods is of no inherent value.
Data is fuel for analysis, insight and action. It can transform an organisation from guesswork to accurate planning, execution and correction - if used well. The question, therefore, should be:
“How can I make the most of freely available retailer data?”
or
"What data can I collect from UK supermarkets as a supplier?"
SKUtrak pricing is variable, depending on the plan that you select. We are proud to be trusted by hundreds of leading FMCG brands to automate reporting, resolve issues proactively and gain a competitive edge with predictive analytics.
Our plans are as follows:
-Free: Get started on your Demand Intelligence journey.
-Seed: Automate reporting, save time and do more with less.
-Core: Unlock powerful insights and predict shopper demand.
-Growth: Turn insight into action and drive growth with data-led decisions.
For further information and our plan features overview, please click here. Should you wish to discuss with our team further, please visit www.skutrak.com/demo to book a meeting.