PM AM Corporation

Customer and/or End Users
Our client is a leading retail merchandising company, listed on Nasdaq, with a 30 year track and marquee clients. The company holds an acknowledged industry leadership position in incentive marketing, database marketing and sales promotion. Its rapid and reliable frontline intelligence gives it the ability to manage simultaneously a large swathe of individual products across multiple lines, stores and locations.
The Challenge
Our company needed to find ways to accelerate its operational improvement. The need to research and analyze operations on a continuous basis was paramount, yet fraught with impediments. Since these products varied in their attributes, research often meant going through the entire product list. It was difficult to link its stores by product and location, given a multiplicity of stores, locations and products. Research and reporting had similar roadblocks. With a rising number of stores, locations, products, customers and the in-house merchandise professionals to cater to them, maintaining customer satisfaction called for research-and-analysis driven quality control.
The Solution
The best solution appeared to be a web-enabled system with multiple functionalities-as a series of modules integrated into a single system. The first module related to product attributes. With dozens of clients and hundreds of products, this module sorted the products of different clients on the basis of attributes recognized by the system. For example a customer could be recognized by the system by product attributes such as brands or flavors, as well by dimensions (clusters of attributes) and item names. For every new entry, the process started with the addition of the client's name to the list. Then items were defined for that client. Items sharing a key attribute were grouped as one dimension for a product or client. Item codes were then generated according to the item and its attributes. The second module in the system related to researching by stores-the critical factor being a store cross-referenced by products, clients and location. A store cross-reference defined products according to trade channels and geography, for example. Using this module, location could be easily linked to chains and then to individual stores within a chain, thus simplifying the task of locating stores or locating products in specific stores. Another module enabled a user to design the research profile for reporting on specific products or other items being analyzed. An analytical module enabled framing specific questions for quality control. With Job, Wave and Task being the key to choosing individual records, the quality control application also integrated elements from legacy processes: Quality Control Rules provided sets of questions to be asked of merchandisers, classified into categorical responses and numerical responses Historical Links facilitated integration with legacy processes to be adopted directly in order to save time Quality Control Process allowed the end users to check the entire process themselves, ensuring their full participation and buy in Product Data Modification provided for creating sets of questions on specific products. Questions could be generated based on stores as well as on products Product Attribute also covered product features cross-referenced by the location of stores, making it a supplementary feature for locating products in the database
Technology
ASP, VB.Net, SQL Server, and Windows 2000 Application
Resulting Benefits
As a result of this solution, conducting continuous quality control, product-wise and store-wise research and analysis was converted from a tedious, almost impossible task, to an on-demand convenience for all levels of operations management. The task of staying close to the customer and responding with high speed to competitive pressures was thus considerably simplified and expedited.