New TrueDemand Release Targets Promotion Execution, Product Introduction, Inventory Control

Posted June 9, 2008

TrueDemand Software, Inc., the leading provider of solutions that help consumer products companies lift sales at the shelf, today announced the latest release of its award-winning solution for retail account teams.

The release adds features to improve the performance and sales lift of trade promotions and new product introductions in addition to helping retail account teams raise overall supplier performance through tighter inventory management and the ability to identify and correct problems at the shelf on a daily basis.

“Consumer goods companies are struggling with the inability to pass along the full cost of commodity and energy price increases and they are being forced to look at ways to improve efficiencies in their processes,” said Eric Peters, CEO of TrueDemand. “This new release helps those companies and their local retail account teams focus on tighter inventory management while still looking for opportunities to
increase sales lift at the shelf.”

Maintaining current service levels and in-stock targets is becoming increasingly challenging for consumer goods companies as large retailers place a greater emphasis on inventory reductions. The new release of TrueDemand’s software-as-a-service solution gives account teams the ability to rapidly identify and correct inventory problems from the distribution center to the store shelf before they result in lost sales. Those problems become all the more critical as retailers decrease inventory levels to reduce costs and drive efficiency. In addition, the release provides an accurate, daily view of shelf-level demand while alerting suppliers to critical inventory issues.

Executing more effectively in the store with the type of prioritized insights and targeted actions provided in the TrueDemand solution is seen by leading analysts as a defining characteristic of successful consumer goods companies.

“Consumer products companies have fewer opportunities now to shape the customer experience and ensure the right products are on the shelf, making demand shaping execution—trade promotions, pricing, new product launch, and controlling replenishment processes all the way to the store—a discipline of growing importance. The winners will be those who execute at the store the best,” said analyst Lora Cecere in the March 2008 AMR Research report, “Demand Management: Trends to Watch.”

Additional Capabilities

Other functional additions to the latest TrueDemand release include:

• A comprehensive view of daily market execution across multiple retailers
• Improved science to detect and correct inventory discrepancies at retail stores that will result in future lost sales
• Revenue-prioritized recommendations for action ranging from store-level merchandising tasks to forecast and inventory adjustments

More detail about the new release is available in the new TrueDemand Resource Center: resources.tdemand.com.

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