Why Retail Assortment Optimization Applications are Critical
The RAOA functional “footprint” primarily covers 12 optimization types that augment planning for both short and long life cycle products, including:
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Customer decision trees — Graphical records leveraged to understand consumer buying habits and the decision-making processes followed by individuals while shopping a category.
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Customer needs identification — Gathering the voice of the customer in the initial creation process.
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Market basket analysis — Support for analysis of customer baskets as part of the assortment optimization process.
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Unified assortment planning — Planning assortments within and across customer touchpoints to support unified retail commerce.
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Pre-period sales analysis — Supporting the sales analysis process for early planning activities.
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Preseason plan creation/seeding — Initial plan development using analytics; often occurring up to 12 months in advance of active periods in certain categories.
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Product attributing — Identifying the attributes of the products planned for the assortment.
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Product selection — Determining the products that will be included in the assortment.
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Size and pack optimization — Ensuring that multisize products are optimally ordered by size and case pack configuration.
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Store clustering — Analytic approaches for creating store groups by using a wide array of possible attributes.
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Transferable demand analysis (halo, cannibalization and substitutability) — Understanding the inter-item customer demand implications of changes to any one item in a common category.
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Visual merchandising — Leveraging product images during the assortment planning process. (Does not include detailed planogramming covered in an alternate Market Guide.)
AI in RAOA
Retailers are aware of the significant opportunity to leverage vast amounts of customer data to drive in-depth customer analytics that enhance merchandising processes. The goal is to create customer-centric assortments across every digital and physical touchpoint, optimally priced and available to consumers when and where they expect to browse, transact and acquire items. RAOAs offer increasingly advanced capabilities that can deliver more accurate predictions. Gartner research What Retail CIOs Need to Know About AI for Merchandising provides a robust view of merchandising use cases for AI. AI is leveraged in combination with advanced analytics, control parameters and algorithms to improve accuracy of optimizations. This figure shows the most common AI techniques used by every vendor tracked in our recent market guide for RAOA.
The New Retail Scenarios Provide an in depth look at the future of consumerism and how technologies such as AI and RAOA will play a vital role in supporting the future retail mission.