Trade Promotions Planning is one of those things which they call it CRUCIAL in retail industry and it has always been a struggle for supply chain managers because if not managed in a good way, will create a mess in inventory levels.

Because of such issues, Aberdeen Group recently conducted a research to find out what Best-in-Class companies do in the area of Trade Promotion Management. In this post and another one later this week, I try to provide a brief summary of their report.


According to Aberdeen, the current state of the trade promotion management is not satisfactory and 75% of the companies are having problems with their systems. On the other hand, companies are aware that if they can manage this task, they would be able to achieve a higher category profit, higher forecast accuracy, and reduced trade overspends.

Aberdeen also noticed that there are a number of factors which cause Best Practice companies to be able to manage their systems in a better way. To mention some of the important ones:

- Leading companies use POS (Point Of Sales) data as a base for their plans
- They also use cross functional teams from finance, marketing, planning, etc. to come up with their plans.
- They try to analyze the historical demand data at the retail level (specially in presence of promotions).
- They also try to use different means to achieve visibility in supply chain