Identify Sales Trends Across Markets, Products and Their Corresponding Volume Drivers

ACNielsen DecisionSMART Assessment Tool provides a quick and easy way of understanding sales performance. A one-click volume decomposition allows you to identify what products are driving growth, what markets are showing gains, and what drivers are impacting performance. The DecisionSMART Assessment Tool uses ACNielsen Scantrack data augmented with ACNielsen consumer demand models to provide instant insights across retailers and markets.

Key Questions Addressed

The DecisionSMART Assessment Tool can be used to address many questions, including:

• For a given market, what items in the portfolio of products are driving volume gains? Which ones show lackluster performance? Why is performance for a particular item lagging?
• For a given brand or promoted product group, which markets/retailers have gained sales volume? Which ones are losing ground?
• What are the underlying reasons for the recent volume changes? How does current performance compare with the previous month or quarter? Have any of the execution dynamics changed?
• What was the change in volume dynamics when Account X changed from Hi-Low to EDLP?
• Is the increase in trade execution yielding the expected volumetric gains? How about the recent emphasis on improving the quality of the mix?
• How much volume is being lost due to cannibalization from other products in my portfolio? What volume is being lost due to competition?
  

Target Audience

The DecisionSMART Assessment Tool is designed for both the field sales force and Sales and Marketing management:

• Used by the sales force to get quick insights of what is driving sales trends at the account level
• Used by management to understand overall execution trends and to identify underlying factors
• Used by both to make quick decisions to act on trends

Key Features

The DecisionSMART Assessment Tool has three distinct sales volume decompositions:

• “Due-to” drivers addressing merchandising, regular price, distribution, cannibalization and competitive trade.
• Accounts/Regions into their constituent regional accounts or geographies.
• Product aggregates (Portfolio, Segment, Brand) into its promoted product groups.

The DecisionSMART Assessment Tool uses a standard “point-and-click” interface with:

• One-click drill-down across products, markets and drivers
• Toolbars for quick access to commonly used functionality (print, save, etc.)
• View data as charts or tables (switch back and forth with one click)
• Save data as a graph (JPEG) or a Microsoft Excel file (CSV)
• Multiple sort capabilities
• Extensive online help
  

Project Content

ACNielsen’s DecisionSMART Assessment Tool provides insights to:

• Portfolio of promoted product groups
• Base and Incremental volume drivers
• Standard ACNielsen Scantrack market or retailers and
  customer defined regions
• Client-defined aggregations of periods such as calendar or
  fiscal months, quarter, rolling quarters, fiscal year-to-date, etc.

Service Description

Provides on-going visibility to the key drivers affecting your business. This information is available for any promoted product group and every Scantrack market or retailer. The service can also support customer-defined sales regions.

Market Decomposition

• Decompose a market group into its constituent markets in order to assess each account/market performance.
• Further decompose market total sales by any driver: distribution, regular price, competitive trade, cannibalization, merchandising quality, merchandising quantity, merchandising effectiveness and merchandising price.
• Users can easily change the product and/or period selection in order to isolate the causes for a dramatic change in performance.

Business Driver Decomposition

• Identify at a glance which underlying business levers are driving volume.
• Complete flexibility in selecting products, markets and periods.
• Complete coverage of trade execution, including a break-out of merchandising by quantity, quality, price and effectiveness.
• New data is added with each monthly Scantrack database update to provide quick, accurate insights on key issues.

Product Decomposition

• Zoom in on the products that are driving or hurting
  your growth.
• Drill-down capabilities let you navigate down the product hierarchy from the category to the brand to the product level, at the click of a mouse.
• Decompose products using any driver, market or period.
• Assess the impact of new product introductions.
  

What VNU Data Types and Sources Can Be Integrated with this Offering?

ACNielsen Scantrack

Homescan

Spectra

TDLinx