New Products and Services Deliver Unprecedented Results to Retailers and Consumer Product Companies Seeking to Maximize Profitability
Lincoln, R.I., April 26, 2005 — Retail Solutions, Inc. (RSI), a leading provider of demand data management services and products, today announced two new initiatives designed to further expand and enhance the company’s already significant portfolio of consumer demand solutions for the retailer and consumer product manufacturing industries.
Since its inception, RSI has continually broken new ground in helping many of the world’s leading manufacturers and retailers to leverage, analyze and act on consumer demand data to achieve business results. The company’s latest offerings are designed to help these organizations gain even greater insights into consumer demand, store performance, supply chain costs and promotional campaign effectiveness, and to drive improved profitability and productivity.
NIS Partnership
The first initiative is the formation of a partnership with National In-Store (NIS), a major U.S. retail resources provider. Under the terms of the agreement, Retail Solutions will integrate its powerful Discover demand data tools with NIS’ Smartcall™ service to help consumer goods companies significantly improve the ROI and productivity of their in-store merchandising activities, particularly new item launches and promotional events.
NIS’s SmartCall is a proprietary process that identifies potential merchandising deficiencies by analyzing and interpreting demand data, and conducts on-site inspection and remediation. In the integrated solution, the detailed demand data collected by Retail Solutions’ Discover will feed SmartCall to produce daily, store-specific visibility into supply chain deficiencies, which will be corrected by one of NIS’s 10,000 representatives at the point of sale.
“By incorporating Retail Solutions’ superior demand data collection and management capabilities with our analytical and in-store processes, we can help our clients achieve a whole new level of retail sales performance,” said Thomas Dowdy, founder and CEO of NIS. “In fact, we recently completed a project using this integrated solution for a major CPG company, which resulted in 96% of the stores of a national drug store chain scanning a new item in five days – an unprecedented rate that far exceeds the industry norm.”
Discover Local
The second initiative is the launch of Discover Local, Retail Solutions’ server-based demand data warehouse solution. Discover Local, a combination of hardware, software and analytical services, was developed for the growing number of consumer product manufacturers and their retailers that don’t want to have their data hosted.
Discover Local leverages Retail Solutions’ EMC-Proven Discover database architecture to deliver the most robust, flexible in-house consumer demand data management capabilities available today. Discover Local offers unsurpassed:
Accuracy and speed: Proprietary software performs extensive data cleansing and validation, ensuring the highest level of data accuracy. Point-of-sales information is updated daily, and queries are completed in minutes.
Flexibility and level of detail: Discover Local collects a granular level of data – by store, by item, by day – and reports the data in whatever format is required. It supports any type of metric, any combination of data attributes, and simultaneous views from both manufacturer and retailer perspectives.
Platform Openness: Discover Local supports a variety of reporting/analysis tools, and provides Web Report Builder and Web Cube Builder for basic reporting and complex analyses. The system also enables easy integration with enterprise business intelligence tools such as Cognos, Business Objects, and Microstrategy.
Scalability: Discover Local can grow to multi-terabytes to support all retail data without sacrificing performance. The architecture also supports emerging data types, such as RFID and GTIN.
Ease of Deployment: A complete turnkey solution, Discover Local can be implemented within 120 days.
Remote Management and Support: Retail Solutions provides ongoing data warehouse management and support, including regular maintenance (data load monitoring, exception processing, database tuning and attribute maintenance). The company also provides system and software upgrades.
Expert Analytics: Discover Local’s data is complemented by strong analytical support from the Retail Solutions’ team of retail experts, who have nearly a century of combined retail experience.
DiscoverLink
Retail Solutions recently announced a unique demand data-sharing solution for retailers, called DiscoverLink. A Web-based portal that enables retailers to easily, effectively and immediately share point-of-sale, inventory and supply chain information with suppliers, DiscoverLink is designed to help retailers gain the sales and supply chain advantages enjoyed by industry leaders such as Wal-Mart and Target. DiscoverLink serves as the core of a collaborative model that allows retailers to achieve greater efficiency and performance at all levels, from better forecasting to a more streamlined supply chain to enhanced customer loyalty.
“No one else has the extensive retail experience and expertise as well as the advanced technology that we bring to our demand data solutions,” said John Jennings, president of Retail Solutions. “We are committed to fusing these two elements together to enable our customers to extract the maximum value from the wealth of data available to them. The NIS partnership, Discover Local and DiscoverLink are all examples of this commitment.”
About Retail Solutions, Inc.
Retail Solutions, Inc. ( www.retailsolutions.com ) is a leading provider of demand data management tools and services for retailers and consumer goods companies seeking to maximize their profitability and efficiency. Using its proprietary database technology, Retail Solutions quickly delivers the most accurate point-of-sale data, along with the expert analysis and consulting needed to act on it. Retail Solutions is a trusted partner of companies that are leaders in their fields, including Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Sara Lee, Brooks, CVS and Walgreens.
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For more information, contact:
Laura Nelson/Jill Ryan
Stauch Vetromile & Mitchell
(401) 438-0614
laura.nelson@svmpr.com
jill.ryan@svmpr.com
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