Analytical Support

Contract Analytical Support for Retail Link*, Top Shelf*, Nielsen*, and Toolbox*

We provide temporary, short term and long term analysts, analytical support and/or online data visualization tools to help your Sales team squeeze all the facts possible from their POS and Marketing data, turning raw data into insightful, useful information, which is presentation ready, to help maintain and grow retail business. Whether it is help with Retail Link, Topshelf, Toolbox, Nielsen or any other POS or Marketing data, we have or can develop the right solution for you.

Our experts and systems offer a wide range of options and reporting tools based on your team’s needs and budget. Some sample reports are below.

Sales:

  • Measure your current rate of sale vs. your current inventories – are you too heavy or too light?
  • What’s driving your inventory levels – is it one item or is it a group of items or stores?
  • Are all your items scanning in the stores that they should be?
  • Replenishment – are your items out performing their current corporate forecasts?
  • Flow of goods – are your orders erratic often leaving you left in short supply? Are you dealing with imported products with longer replenishment timelines? VendorLink can help plan your inventory requirements based on consumption, allowing your organization to forecast more accurately and smoothing out your flow of goods allowing for better sales and service levels.

Inventory Management:

  • YTD (year to date) sales vs. same time as YA (year ago)
  • Seasonal profiling – does seasonality affect your items? When do you need to be in store to have a successful season? When does your seasonal item consumption start to slow?
  • Promotional effectiveness – (are you getting the bang for your buck) Do you know what promotional methods work best for your category and your items?
  • Promotional Orders – VendorLink can put together your recommended promotional orders to ensure that we put the right amount of product in the right stores helping reduce costly markdowns.

Planning:

  • VendorLink has numerous effective templates to cover your yearly plans and/or reviews, let us help you in your business planning and reviews. We provide professional results and presentations.
  • As our team has a number of years’ experience working with national retailers we will supply your specific results in a useable, printable and most of all understandable format.

What Is Retail Link* and Top Shelf and what do they do?

  • These retailer specific communications and data retrieval ports provide a direct link to store specific data through an internet connection. Data sharing and shared ownership with the vendor community is key to the success of most retailers in today’s competitive retail environment. These tools allow the vendor community to put the ‘Right Product’ in the ‘Right Place’ at the ‘Right Time’, with the ‘Right amount of inventory’. Today’s large retail account expectations are that their manufacturers or vendors use these tools to help manage their day to day business.

Reports:

  • *Many of today’s systems are sophisticated and complex requiring both time and energy to learn and adapt. Also of the utmost importance is ensuring that you are actually pulling the complete and entire picture to make the right fact based decisions. Incorrect data pulls can often be created by the novice user. Using incorrect queries repeatedly can compound issues. Don’t let this happen to you or your company.

Generic Reports:

  • Vendor score card (VSC) – measures much more than sales, provides topline picture of your business’ most common topics Sales, weeks on hands/ inventories, initial and maintain margins for Wal-Mart and Markdowns. Gauges how your company is tracking vs. previous week, month, quarter as well as year.

Sample Reports:

  • Year to date file (YTD File) – measures current sales ( $ sold and/or units) vs. same time year ago.
  • Promotional performance report – custom query measures the lift of your promotions over your baseline. Allows you to better forecast for future promotions.

Sales Reports:

  • Year to date file (YTD File) – measures current sales ( $ sold and/or units) vs. same time year ago
  • Promotional performance report – custom query measures the lift of your promotions over your baseline. Allows you to better forecast for future promotions.

Inventory Reports:

  • Current onhands – measure your inventories at store level by fine line, category, or right down to the sku level if required – we can customize your reports to measure what you need to see.

Planning Reports:

  • Business line review (BLR) – the ultimate in “what if tools” ! You can determine impacts of possible price increases to Wal-Mart’s margins caused by, either cost of goods or retail changes. You can plan your next years volume accounting for category, store and comp store growth. What about new product launches, line extensions or new listings ? Yes these too can be factored into your planning process. The BLR can do these and much more
  • 52 Week Budget – goes hand in hand with your BLR. Tracks how you are currently trending towards both you and your buyer’s yearly plan.

Contact us for more information or to get started immediately!