If you remember, last week I talked about the importance of Trade Promotion Management for retail sector and provided a brief summary of Aberdeen Group´s recent research. In this part, I am going to talk about what the retail supply chain managers can do to achieve best practice.




The answer is not rocket science: PPS or People, Processes and Systems. Aberdeen´s research has found out that companies must develop action plans to develop below capabilities if they want to achieve excellence in Trade Promotion Management:

- They need to have a centralized data repository to provide a single source of data for different products. This is a prerequisite for achieving high accuracy of forecast.

- They need supply chain software which provide them with real time performance management capabilities: Features such as dashboards with customizable performance measures.

- They need to involve people from different departments such as finance and marketing in the planning process.

- And at last, companies should think about the ability to activate return chain (let´s say kind of Reverse logistics) for the items which have problems or the items which haven´t sold.