Business Tip 17
How to ... Create Customer-Specific Views

As we have discussed earlier in this series (see Tip #5), not everyone defines a category or category segment the same way or reports on the same time periods. Manufacturers define product structures to reflect the way they manage their business internally, or the way they believe the consumer generally shops the category. Retailers may look more specifically at their category shoppers' behavior to define a different product structure, include additional products, or base it on the way that they are managing the retail side of the business.

Creating and managing these different views has been a difficult and time consuming issue in the past. Now applications, such as Interactive Edge’s XP3 Suite, can store and report on unlimited view definitions.

Create a Starting List

It all begins with creating a data source at the UPC/SKU level for defining the product structure. The starting list should be large enough to eventually include all the SKUs that would be in each customer’s definition. Each SKU would be attributed with segmentation, characteristics or descriptors. Here is an example of the Auto Dish Detergent with the starting segmentation.

It is important to have the ability to create unlimited number of segmentations to accommodate all the different product structure definitions. The same is true for defining custom time periods, such as the Fiscal Year To Date for a retailer.

Assign Segmentations

Each of these segmentations is assigned to each UPC or SKU.

While there is an option to add segmentation manually, this is impractical for large numbers of SKUs or a large selection of retailers. A better approach is to make use of the program's capability to read retailer-specific definitions from such sources as plan-o-gram files and retailer vendor product profiles.

Using the XP3 Import command, this segmentation can be imported and automatically assigned to each SKU sold by this retailer.

The new retailer-specific segmentation is now stored in the database and available to be used in charts and tables. Periodically, these segmentations can be updated as the retailer adds or deletes items from the plan-o-grams or modifies the product structure. Monthly updates can even be automated to make the update process seamless.

The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.