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Product Updates: CIM and PIM

January 2024

Price Image Management: Watchlists

  • PIA’s Contribution Ranking 9-box identifies Sales Opportunities, Profit Potentials, etc. at an item-level for customers.
  • A new feature, ‘Watchlists’ allows users to create groups of products (watchlists) that share certain characteristics, tag them, and soon, review their progress over time.
  • “Tracking the evolution of our SKU’s to understand how our decisions influence their Contribution Ranking allows us to continue to improve our decision-making over time.”

PIM: Threaded Discussions & Free Text Notes

  • Pricing is a team sport and customers rely on PIM to serve as a source of truth for their pricing decisions. To support that goal and enable more collaboration across users, we have launched the ‘Threaded Discussions’ feature to allow users of enterprise accounts to discuss, keep notes, and document their decisions and actions in PIM.
  • Currently, users can create Threads on Pricing Rules, Watchlists, Watchlists’ Products, as well as on features within the Product Table such as Client Locks and Price Overwrites.
  • The image on the left shows an example where a Threaded Discussion was created to explain to other users why the Pricing Rule is a Soft rule and not a Hard rule.

PIM: Product Seasonality Impact

  • Timing is everything in retail. Many items have fluctuations of purchasing patterns throughout the year.
  • Users can now review item-level seasonality information under the Product Details tab by clicking on a specific item, then selecting the Seasonality Impact sub-tab. This view displays the seasonal demand for a product by Week of Year, Near View Trend, and Day of Month to help users understand the Projected Unit % Change.
  • The example shows the seasonal demand information for a 2 LB clamshell of strawberries. The view identifies that within this zone of stores, this product sees peak demand on week 26 of the year in late June. It then shows the near-term variation in the demand expected and identifies on which day of the month demand is likeliest to peak as well.
  • With a toggle, users can display the cyclical seasonality charts via a different view.

PIM: Advanced Filtering

  • By popular demand, new filters have been added to the Contribution Ranking and Category Sales Ranking views within Price Image Analysis (PIA). Users can now filter by Categorization, Brand, and Prioritization as seen below.

PIM: Product Seasonality Impact

  • Promo Lift Analysis (PLA) is the equivalent of Price Image Analysis but in a promo context. This capability provides insights into the differential unit movement arising from a promotion.
  • Products are classified based on their response to a promotion and are visualized in complementary charts that offer insights into the strategy group’s promo lift classifications and distribution by product category.
  • In the view, users can see PLA’s Promo Lift Classifications, Promo Lift Rankings, and Promo Price Image Classifications.

PIM: Variable Date Window

  • By default, PLA considers the current pricing window when providing promotional life score information at an item-level.
  • This new Variable Date Window feature allows users to select different time intervals to review the projected delta sales & units and promo lift scores for their products.

Competitive Intelligence Management (CIM):

  • Analytics (Price Investment Tracking): In 2022, we launched a capability to reverse-engineer where your competitors are making price investments. In 2023, we standardized this offering and turned it into an ‘always-on’ model which refreshes your competitors’ price zones automatically on an on-going basis based on new competitor data. In January (2024), we’re releasing a 4-Box report that will identify your Price Index Offenders and your Gross Margin Opportunities and prioritize which ones you should action.
    • In the view below, the user is told that 21.7% of their actionable items are candidates to increase gross margins and are tagged as Important. By selecting Open Details, the user will be able to see the specific candidate items.
  • Product Linking (Lighthouse):
    • Database of average weights for produce items have added 350K+ distinct items across 150 banners. These average weights are used by Lighthouse’s Price Per Unit Selector to enable equivalization between our Customers’ products and their competitors’ items. If you already have equivalization enabled in your program, you will continue to benefit from these average weights on an on-going basis. If you do not have equivalization turned on in your program, simply alert your Customer Success or Solutions Engineering resource and they will turn it on for you.
      • For example: the average Organic Banana at Hi Lo Foods is 0.43 lbs and the average Small Navel Orange is 0.52 lbs 
      • When this feature is enabled, Lighthouse will automatically update the latest average weight when equivalizing the prices in your reports.   
  • Product Linking (Clipper):  
    • New improvements for Clipper that capture extra attributes under competitor websites under Product Information. Users can view these attributes by selecting View Attributes from Clipper extension.  
    • Clipper updates pushed to ensure numerical values within descriptions are consistently captured as well.  
  • Online Data: please see: 
  • In-Store Data: 
    • MissionScanner: data collected from MissionScanner can now be included by default to run through Engage3’s linking algorithms to enable more efficient link creation and review. Data from MissionScanner can also now be searched using keywords (previously limited to UPC/SKU).  
    • Missions V2 (Android): newest version released to Play Store on January 22nd includes a number of usability improvements that were submitted by customers and field auditors, including but not limited to: 
      • Improved progress bar for each Mission 
      • Improvements to submit via email user flow 
      • Improvements to alerts letting auditors know when poor cellular or wifi connectivity may affect data submissions 
      • Improvements to the Sorting feature 
  • Data QA (Data Integrity & Exploration): for clients using Data Integrity tool to review pricing data as part of their regular workflows. 
    • Regular Price calculator updated to provide visibility into how prices are calculated.  
    • Exposed new data columns in the User Interface and the Exports, including: 
      • Raw Regular Price, Comp Unit of Measure, Conversion Factor, and Unit of Measure Conversions. 
    • Exposed QA Reason Codes in User Interface to provide more visibility into why a Price was invalidated. 
    • Exposed a Show Edited Records filter to allow users to filter to the Edited prices faster. 
    • Added feature to enable Auto-Approvals to be set across Price Zones.