A grocery chain’s organic blueberry buyer decided to run a price promotion at the height of the season. Unbeknownst to him, the buyer of regular blueberries had chosen to offer a price special at the same time.

But retailers no longer have to think of blueberries — or anything else — in isolated silos. Technology is helping executives make holistic decisions by combining and analyzing data for planning, pricing, assortment, shelf-space allocation, forecasting, replenishment and other tasks.

“These decisions go together and they impact each other,” says Rafael Gonzalez Caloni, executive vice president of marketing for Atlanta-based Predictix. The company’s software as a service (SaaS) offering addresses many formerly disjointed decisions in the aggregate by starting with a clean slate instead of piecing together data from fragmented legacy systems.

With Predictix, retailers put all of the data on a single platform and filter it through the same forecasts, rules and processes, thus avoiding the “conflicting realities” of a more diffuse system built over time, Caloni says.

“Predictix has a common view of the consumer that is leveraged across all of its solutions,” says Kevin Sterneckert, a research director at Boston-based AMR Research. “If I’m making a merchandise assortment decision, I would want that to be in agreement with how I’m going to set prices or how I‘m going to replenish the product.”

Predictix developed the ability to link decisions partly by drawing upon the experience of the engineers who designed the current generation of segmented “behind the firewall” software for retailing decisions, Caloni says. The company also is taking advantage of “cloud computing” that uses the web to provide greater capacity.

Even though Predictix affords the ability to combine decisions, merchants do not have to change the way they make those decisions, Caloni says. “If you’re a large retailer you’re not just going to take off-the-shelf planning,” he says. Instead, the system can be tailored to the users’ way of doing business. At the same time, the underlying platform remains the same, which helps Predictix control costs while keeping every client current when it improves the system.

Predictix offers more than a dozen modules, which enables merchants to choose parts of the Predicitix offering while continuing to use other established systems. “It’s not something we expect people to take lock, stock and barrel from Day 1,” Caloni says.

Five retail chains, four of them among the largest Tier 1 merchants, are using at least one module. A global hardlines merchant found that using its existing systems in new markets would take too much time and money to implement.

Another Predictix client, a global apparel brand, needed to plan for 6,000 stores but balked at the seven-figure tab for developing its own proprietary enterprise software. Instead, the company leased the store-planning portion of Predictix and was operating with a first draft in three weeks.

Managing promotions
A third retailer, a 700-store grocer, had an issue with managing promotions. Buyers were launching more than 10,000 promotions annually, many of them in conflict (including the blueberry example). The company had spent more than $10 million on a traditional approach that was so slow buyers wouldn’t use it. “They’d be on the phone with the vendors and they couldn’t wait 15 minutes for a system to calculate what the effects of a promotion would be,” Caloni says.

The grocer licensed Predictix promotions, and the first iteration was running in about six weeks. After the limited pilot test, the retailer rolled out the program to more than 100 buyers.

The number of stores and SKUs — rather than the number of “seats” — affects Predictix pricing; no new hardware or personnel are required, according to Caloni.

By managing promotions within the system, retailers can increase productivity, effectiveness and accuracy, Caloni says. With more accurate planning, for example, they reduce waste, enhance service, boost margins and can test differing promotions to find the most effective version.