Promotion Planning and Optimization

Background

Traditional promotions were not helping to bring the customer into the store and reducing the margin more than necessary. There was a need for personalized promotions to react on individual customer preferences. There was also a need to react immediately on customer behaviour, changes by regional trends and competitor prices which cannot be planned in advance. Existing price planning and promotions needed a lot of manual intervention based on gut feel, personal experience and were managed across different siloed applications. Price and promotion specialists required a ability to holistically analyze increasing data sets from new sources like customer insides. Getting insights into evolving trends pushed by social media was a really difficult task. So, there was a need for a system which could help the users to solve all these problems.

From the initial problem statement the idea is to bring in new promotion strategies for the end-to-end process across industries. The set of new promotion strategies focuses on the key trends “personalisation”, “dynamic”, “Omni-channel”.

"How might we help our Retail users to attract customers by promotions, so that they can achieve their promotion goals?"

How are we solving our user problems?

SCOPE and focus

In order to create and launch a promotion, a system should offer options for promotion planning, Optimisation and Execution for a user. So, we started collecting information related to promotion planning, optimisation and execution applications offered by SAP. SAP as a enterprise software company, had existed solution for Omni-channel Execution but not for Promotion Planning and Optimisation.

So, as a starting point we started concentrating more on planning and optimisation options.

Promotion Planning strategies:

Omni channel: stock reduction, revenue, markdown
Personalised: Sales history of customer, Unused promotion (x times)
Dynamic-Event based: Number of clicks in the web for one product, increase cross selling by proposing discounts for products fitting to the basket

Promotion Optimisation

Provisioning and Visualisation of promotion proposals on defined strategies using
Forecast for stock, sales lift Historical data like customer sales history, used promotions
Customer signals information like number of clicks in the current session

Promotion Execution

Enable Promotion calculation reflecting new strategies
Inform consuming processes: Marketing to inform customers, logistics to provide the right product at the right place, sales channels to interact with the customer Support “one promotion object”

Capability MAP

Capability map usually defined inside SAP, to understand where exactly our solution may fit inside SAP's enterprise solution and how the data communication to the system may happen in future. Below picture shows the capability of our application (marked in blue), also how other systems are connected to us and the master data connection.

People and culture

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We are strong believers in giving our employees a voice. Our teams are put together with the help of our resident psychologist to ensure maximum productivity and engagement.