dunnhumby, the global leader in customer data science, reported growing momentum and demand for its Enterprise Promotions Management (EPM) platform by North American retailers. Over the last 12 months, dunnhumby has expanded its EPM client base of national and regional retailers by nearly 300 percent, supporting more than 20,000 stores and connecting with hundreds of their vendors across thousands of users.

“Retailers, vendors and other third-party suppliers have long been frustrated with the inefficiencies in vendor funding management that has resulted in ineffective promotions, reliance on outdated processes, and lost revenue”

Historically, trade funding deals were manually tracked across emails, spreadsheets, faxes, and even cocktail napkins, and then re-keyed into other systems on average 6-11 times. “Retailers, vendors and other third-party suppliers have long been frustrated with the inefficiencies in vendor funding management that has resulted in ineffective promotions, reliance on outdated processes, and lost revenue,” said Jose Gomes, President, North America for dunnhumby. “We’ve brought trade promotion management into the 21^st century by offering retailers a one-stop platform that connects all of the parts, people, processes, media and data – at every stage of the promotional process. Powered by customer data science, retailers also gain promotional insights and forecasting to better understand, engage, and meet the needs of their shared customer. This is the retail industry’s best kept secret.”

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How It Works

dunnhumby’s EPM platform combines best-in-class, data-driven promotion forecasting and analytics with innovative workflow and vendor management to plan, deliver, track and measure every promotion across retailer and supplier teams. The platform consists of five critical components:

• Cloud-based Vendor Portal. For retailers, they gain efficiencies in deal negotiation, increase vendor funding, and reduce audit fees, with dozens of configurable billing rules to manage vendor funds. For vendors, they can submit new products, cost changes, and promotional deals.
• Workflow. Retailers can streamline promotional processes across in-store, print, and even digital media with a task management system to ensure timely, efficient and consistent execution. Retailers can configure process steps, assign owners and deadlines to their team, vendors and third parties, as well as receive alert emails for overdue tasks.
• Promotions Forecasting. Retailers can leverage machine-learning and customer insights to forecast the impacts of all promotional decisions throughout the entire process. In addition, retailers can conduct real-time forecast evaluation of vendor offers to understand the impact that changes to print and digital advertising have on sales and profit.
• Promotion Analytics. Based on financial and customer metrics, retailers can quickly evaluate their historic promotions to inform future promotional plans. By understanding the total sales lift by brand and total category including customer switching behavior, retailers can easily identify how and where to cut unprofitable promotions.
• Retail Media Design. Retailers gain efficiencies for print and digital promotions and ad circulars. Retailers can design layouts, allocate space, assign products, and select digital images all integrated with the necessary proofing copy and design functionality in one integrated platform. Customer data science guides product selection and placement to maximize sales and profit.

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Coming Soon for CPGs

The vendor community will soon have access to promotional analytics and customer insights through the EPM Vendor Portal, powered by dunnhumby Customer Data Science. Access to promotional insights and the ability to activate those insights will enable vendors to improve promotion effectiveness, and improve retailer collaboration through smarter, data-driven business decisions that benefit both partners.

Driving Return on Investment

dunnhumby’s Enterprise Promotion Management platform clients report the following results in the first year:

• Sales increase of 1 – 4%
• Profitability increase of 3-5%
• Increase vendor funding by at least 1%
• Reduced time and effort spent on promotions planning by 10-20% by employee
• Reduced audit fees at least 90%
• Return on investment ranging from 10 – 20%

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