JOANN, the nation’s leading craft and fabric specialty retailer, has partnered with Impact Analytics to drive incremental EBITDA impact through promo optimization. Impact Analytics is one of the fastest-growing Advanced Analytics and AI-infused SaaS companies in the US. Impact Analytics is deploying its proprietary open-source product, Promo$mart, at JOANN to help Category Managers analyze historical promos, simulate future scenarios through predictive modeling, and generate custom visualizations and reports for continuous, daily campaign and program monitoring to enable effective decision making.

“Promo$mart will be the one-stop-shop for all promotion management at JOANN and will help us transition from a spreadsheet-based workflow to a cloud-based digital application that provides real-time insights,” says Chris DiTullio, SVP Stores, Operations and Chief Marketing Officer at JOANN. He adds, “This allows us to eliminate 30-40% of margin-draining promos and to reallocate those dollars to the best performing SKUs and categories. IA’s preliminary consulting work is already increasing margin in our direct mailer campaigns, and with Promo$mart in place, we expect a broader, significant margin impact.”

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The heart of the Promo$mart tool is the analytics engine powered by advanced Machine Learning models built at a SKU level that drive all the insights. The net promo lift is calculated at an overall basket-level as the models capture affinity, cannibalization, pull forward, halo and other secondary impacts. The tool allows for simulation of multiple promo types like BOGO, % off, $ off, etc. making it the most robust SaaS product in the market.

Prashant Agrawal, President and CEO of Impact Analytics adds, “We are able to collate and harmonize sales and promo data from disparate systems and sources including Excel sheets, Direct Mailers, Email, Web etc. which is a major pain point for most retailers – we depend on advanced techniques like text mining, image recognition to help in this stage. We are then able to analyze copious amounts of structured and unstructured data using Machine Learning algorithms to provide real-time insights.”

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“The vision of our company has been to drive value to our clients by making AI and ML accessible to them through our best-in-class products. Our SaaS products can connect to any existing Database, CRM or Inventory platform to make the overall integration process seamless and ensure real-time recommendations,” says Prashant.

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