SAS^® Promotion Optimization

Promotions are the driving force of retail. An optimally timed, placed and priced promotion can have significant impact on product demand and, consequently, revenue. But how can you know if a promotion is truly optimal?

When planning promotions, retailers often struggle to determine the expected lift in demand from planned promotions, or even which items to promote through which vehicles. Meeting revenue and profitability goals in the face of these issues requires capabilities that most retail planning systems lack.

Make optimal promotion decisions
SAS Promotion Optimization is a comprehensive promotion planning solution that provides retailers the ability to maximize margin and revenue by accurately determining which items or groups of items to promote, in which locations, at what price points and via which promotional vehicles.

• Maximize return on investment in promotions. With an integrated view of all planned promotional events, you can predict the incremental lift in demand at a particular location based on promotional price and media. With this insight, you can maximize return by allocating appropriate resources to planned events.

• Improve profitability by optimizing promotions planning. Identify which items or groups of items should be promoted at which locations, at which price and via which promotional vehicle to achieve revenue and profitability goals. You can also create what-if scenarios to assess the impact of vendor-offered promotional costs on revenue, margin and sales units.

• Minimize revenues lost due to stock-outs. Fine-tune your inventory planning decisions with best-in-class demand forecasting and demand modeling.

Monitor performance past, present and future
SAS Promotion Optimization offers powerful capabilities for a number of tasks central to the promotion process:

• Develop models to predict the base demand and the incremental lift in demand from planned promotions at any level (enterprise, store, category, item).
• Analyze the performance of past promotions in terms of revenue increase, sales volume and profitability.
• Monitor the performance of ongoing promotional events.
• Model and evaluate the impact of promotional decisions on a category's overall demand, revenue and margin by creating what-if scenarios.
• Maintain a calendar that provides an enterprise view of all planned promotional events, along with advertising and marketing support for each planned event.

Manage the entire merchandise life cycle
SAS Promotion Optimization is a component of the SAS Revenue Optimization Suite, the only software suite available today that helps retailers manage revenue and margin through the entire merchandise life cycle. This suite integrates advanced data management, forecasting and analytic capabilities to help retailers set and manage regular prices, plan optimal promotions and execute the most successful markdown strategies.