How Northeast Grocery Modernized Its Trade Execution Processes

In the consumer goods industry, trade promotion is a critical engine for driving sales, consumer engagement and overall business growth. However, it's often an area of business challenged by increasing complexity, including demanding data requirements and the need for enhanced collaboration.In this webinar transcript, Lisa Johnston, editorial director at Consumer Goods Technology, spoke with Rich Mendolera, director of business analytics and pricing at Northeast Grocery, and Ryan O'Halloran, president of pre-sales and global consulting at DemandTec. They discussed research findings that highlight the tension between the perceived necessity of trade promotions and the frustration companies experience with outdated, manual systems. The conversation explored how automation, improved data quality and better collaboration can help both manufacturers and retailers modernize their trade promotion processes.Johnston: Hi, everyone. Welcome to "Capture Every Trade Dollar: Smarter Execution Through Automation." My name is Lisa Johnston, and I am the editorial director at Consumer Goods Technology. Very excited to welcome you here today. So, I'm excited to set the stage today with some research on how CPGs and retailers are approaching trade promotion and deal processing. I'm going to go through a little bit of the research in the white paper, and then I'm going to bring up our speakers for a great conversation.So now, this is a space that's always been important for growth, but it's also a space that's facing increasing complexity. There are more promotions, there are bigger data demands, and there's greater pressure to collaborate. So this webinar is grounded on research that was conducted by the EnsembleIQ research team on behalf of DemandTec and in collaboration with CGT. So on the screen, you can see some of the methodology, and you can download the white paper that goes much more in-depth into the research in the resource center, which is under the Q&A. So if you look under the Q&A section, you'll see the blocks there, and it'll take you right to the page where you can download the research.Okay, so what did the survey find? We're going to talk about today. For one thing, trade promotion today is both essential and frustrating. Companies see promotions as a major driver in sales and customer engagement, but updated processes, manual bottlenecks and fragmented systems are slowing progress. And that tension really came through loud and clear in the survey.So here is part of the problem. About three-quarters of companies told us that they're satisfied with their current trade promotions, but only about a quarter believe those systems give them a competitive advantage. And that gap is really important. It shows us that companies are making due, but it's not getting them ahead, and they are looking for more than just functional systems. They want tools that deliver real differentiation in the market. So, you can see a little bit of a snapshot of their priorities on the next slide. So, nearly six in 10 respondents said automating manual processes is their top goal when improving promotion platforms. And to give you a little bit of context, that ranked higher than revenue growth, margin expansion or market share gains. So they want to move faster, they want fewer errors and they want to free up their teams from repetitive work. I think we can all agree that those are important priorities.It is not, though, just about speed. So respondents called out some specific pain points that they really want. We found that bottlenecks and approvals are really slowing down deal execution. Teams are often working with data that they really don't fully trust. And so, these challenges are a lot more than just inconveniences. There can be up to 100 people often involved in deal processing. So manual workflows lead to more opportunities for mistakes and delays, which ultimately drain profitability. Data quality in particular was a sticking point. So one-third of leaders said their ability to select the right promotions or evaluate performance is limited by poor or incomplete data.When we ask how companies measure success, financial performance topped the list, which is not surprising. But leaders also pointed to customer-centric measures and operational efficiency. So what this combination indicates is that organizations are really under pressure to deliver, yes, margin improvements, but also better customer experiences and smoother internal operations. And then of course, manufacturers aren't the only ones who are effective. Retailers are feeling the impact too, whether it's delayed insights, inconsistent execution or missed opportunities for collaboration. And so you can see some of the things listed on that slide, and again, if you download the report, there's much more in there, goes into this much more in depth.So really, just to wrap us up before I bring up our guests, companies, they're relatively satisfied, but they're not yet seeing a competitive advantage. Automation is rising to the top of the priority list. Data quality and manual bottlenecks or challenges, and both manufacturers and retailers have a lot to gain from more connected systems. So with that, I'm pleased to welcome Rich Mendolera, director of business analytics and pricing in Northeast Grocery, and Ryan O'Halloran, president of pre-sales in global consulting at DemandTec, to the virtual stage. We're going to dig into some of these findings, and we're going to talk about what modernization really looks like in practice. So Ryan and Rich, welcome.Why don't we do some quick intros? Tell us just a little bit about yourself, a little bit, your role and your organization. Ryan, why don't you go first?O'Halloran: Sure. Thank you, Lisa for having us. So Ryan O'Halloran, head of services and consulting for DemandTec, and basically, my role is to work with retailers on implementing solutions in the DemandTec platform. Among those solutions are price and promotion optimization and also trade fund collaboration. So basically, those are the areas that DemandTec works in. My background personally is on the retailer side, a number of years working in the retail industry and obviously, a number of years working in the software industry, primarily partnering with and working with retailers.Johnston: Okay. And I think you recently, just a quick note, you had some big news over at your organization?O'Halloran: Correct. Yeah, just recently, it was announced that DemandTec is separating out into its own standalone company. So this is huge news for DemandTec overall. It allows us a faster path to innovation and we have a great investment partner along with us, Longshore Capital. So this has again just recently been announced and it affords us a lot of opportunities to work better with the industry as a whole and with our current and prospective customers in the future.Johnston: Great. Definitely exciting news. If anyone has any questions, they can feel free to go ahead and drop them in the Q&A function and we can discuss them at the end of the event. Rich, welcome. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role?Mendolera: Sure thing, thanks, Lisa. Congratulations, Ryan as well, and to DemandTec. I am Rich Mendolera, the director of pricing analytics for Northeast Grocery Northeast Shared Services. So Northeast Grocery is a parent company that combines Price Chopper, Market 32 and Tops Markets operating company, and Northeast Shared Services is the administrative function that supports both of the retailers. In my role, pricing and analytics fall under me from the standpoint of margin and category reporting. We also oversee consumer analytics, and in my current role, we're off-shooting promotion, but in my past role, I also had the promotions area under me and we have been using DemandTec for many years to support us under my leadership through pricing, deal management and promotional activity.Johnston: Certainly well-versed in many of the things that we dug into in the white paper. So it's great to have both of you here today. Ryan, I want to start with you, since we were just talking about the research. I would love to set the stage a little bit and get your perspective on what you thought, what were some of the most compelling insights that you found out of the research, and what do you think that it indicates about the current state of trade promotion?O'Halloran: Yeah. So, of course, trade promotions have been in the retail industry for a while and they're not a new concept. Vendors and retailers have been partnering together on promotions basically since the inception of advertising. So, everybody wants to sell more units, and the end goal, of course, is to drive growth in the brands and categories as a whole. However, retailers as a whole tend to be very cycle-based and tend to repeat a lot of things over and over again because it's the easy solution to say, "we did this last year, let's do it again the same week, or maybe offset due to the holiday." But basically, it's just been historically easy to keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it's not necessarily the optimal result. Part of what the study is showing us and what we'll discuss through the course of this webinar here today is how retailers and vendors can collaborate, gauge the level of success together, and ultimately, minimize the friction to planning a better promotion that's mutually beneficial through the course of the process.I think you'll hear, and we've heard through the research and through talking to our customers, that it's not always easy to do promotions, which is why maybe some gravitate towards repeating what they've done before, but if we can remove some of that friction, adopt AI and infuse AI in the right places, it allows more collaboration using the same sets of data and reading off the same sheet of music as your vendor partners as a retailer so you can plan a better promotion. Basically, what's going to be effective for the whole business, and where can we adopt AI to help with that process the most?Johnston: So most companies did say that automating manual processes is a top priority. So why do you think that priority isn't translating into faster action? What's slowing them down?O'Halloran: So one of the things we've seen with retail customers is that innovation or modernization of technology has been a little bit slower than the industry as a whole. Retailers tend to have legacy systems that are very tightly coupled with what's going on, and it can be difficult to replace pieces of it since some of that knowledge is very siloed both into individual persons as well as individual teams. So it can be difficult and time-consuming to get off of those systems, but there are new technologies out there, both AI-infused solutions as well as just AI in general, that can augment some of the stumbling blocks of prior years and make this a little bit easier. So, the key thing that we're finding is it's important to get started, pick off pieces that you can in logical chunks, but don't let the legacy system constraints or what may have been a hindrance in the past stop you from a path to innovation where there's opportunity to do something faster, more efficiently, more productively.Johnston: Okay. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that as we go through. And Rich, I'm going to go to you in just a second because you've done a lot of what we're talking about already. But before we do it, we're going to have some polls during this event. So in just a few seconds, you should see our first poll come up on your screen. It's going to ask you where you are in your trade promotion transformation journey. Would love to get your feedback, just see where everyone on the event sits along that journey. So while people are answering, Rich, would love to bring you into this conversation, want to get the perspective on the retail side about the research findings: do they really reflect on what you're seeing in your day-to-day work with your vendors?Mendolera: Yeah, absolutely. We really want to support our vendors in the best way possible. We certainly-Johnston: And when we say vendors, sorry to interrupt. When we say vendors, we're talking about trade partner, right? Because yes, we're talking about our CPG partners. Yes.Mendolera: That's right. Trade partners really want to use the tools to make better decisions, as does the retailer. And automation definitely is top of mind on that journey. At Northeast Grocery, we've taken a lot of strides to get to where we are today. There was a lot of manual data entry into various systems, some confusing analysis that we would get out of our various tool sets and we would try to put together many different sources of data to really make an informed decision. So, it was a challenge we knew we had to take on, and DemandTec's deal management, collaboration and promotional planning and promotion optimization and price optimization, really all of the products, have allowed us to take steps in that direction.Tops Markets themselves have been on the platform for longer, but we feel so confident in the tool set and the automation that we've created and the insights that we can glean from the tools that one of the first consolidation projects during our merger with Price Chopper Market 32 was to onboard Price Chopper Market 32 onto the DemandTec solutions and take advantage of all of the good work and automated processing that we had that Tops was able to leverage for many years prior.Johnston: So, it's like a why-wait situation, right? Why wait? Okay. So can you take us back a little bit about what your process looked like before the automation? We talked about some of the pain points from the research. What were some of your pain points that were really slowing things down?Mendolera: Certainly. When we embarked with DemandTec many years ago, we had paper deal sheets and there was a lot of recording in the system and then in legacy mainframe systems and things like that, human intervention. So we took a step back, we worked with DemandTec to really go and figure out how that exchange happens over the application itself, and be able to leverage that with an automated process. So we got rid of a lot of the bottlenecks concerning manual entry and then we got rid of a lot of the bottlenecks for data accuracy because we were able to get the information right from the vendor, make sure that it met our specifications, had that feed downstream into our systems and then that really allowed us to get rid of some of the labor-intensive processes of just getting the data to someplace and spending a lot more time on being able to analyze what the data was telling us, which included measuring promotion effectiveness, getting to the answers around profitability. Some of the pain points that you mentioned on the outside of the research.Johnston: Okay, great. Looking at the polls, it looks like most of the people in our audience are really just getting started, so this is great. Most are either they're just getting started or they're still early stages, they're exploring automation or they're exploring new platforms. We're going to put up another poll, would like to hear a little bit more about the pain points. You should see it pop up momentarily if you don't already, but what are your team's biggest trade promotion challenges today? So yeah, would love to hear from you to weigh in. While people are answering, Rich told us the before, now, let's talk a little bit about the after. So what does this process look like now with this investment that you've made? Talk us a little bit through how your collaboration with your team and your partners has evolved.Mendolera: Sure. So today, really, the DemandTec products are again ingrained in our day-to-day activities as a business. It starts with the deal information. So we ingest that information and act on it within the platform. That's where our trade negotiation takes place. Once we have those deals executed, we are already in the process of measuring trade spend and profitability for our day-to-day sales movement and then preparing how that plays into our promotional planning and our forecasting. We leverage the data again to automate our billing processes. So there's a lot of automation when it comes to that. We are able to access the information in DemandTec and feed that into our... Actually, really within the DemandTec tool itself, right into our pricing application, the pricing management and pricing optimization work that we do in DemandTec, as well as promotional optimization. So the information flows right over. We can see based on historical data that's ingested into DemandTec from our internal data, what the performance of past promotions are and what the predictions are for future promotions.We've started to delve into the cost change platform that DemandTec houses within their collaboration entity as well. And that's helped to streamline a lot of the process around informing but also negotiating potential changes to cost structure. And then that allows us to be very nimble in our approach, again, to react to what is our trade fund in trade spending going to look like as a result of that cost change? How can we better balance a promotion or do we need to change a promotion? What is the fallout on a pricing strategy? So all those tools help us streamline a lot of the workloads for the different teams in my area, especially in the merchandising area. And then we see a lot of opportunity to continue down that path of automation and getting additional insights through the use of AI tools, GenAI tools like ChatGPT for instance or other BI-type related GenAI tools as well that we are embarking on.Johnston: Great. So again, looking at some of these, people responded, some of the pain points that they're indicating seem to really align with the things that we've been talking about. So Ryan, I want to revisit one of the starting points from the survey, and it was that most CPGs said they're satisfied with their current systems. Really, it was just about a quarter of them who think that they give them a competitive edge. So what do you think this disconnect is coming from?O'Halloran: So, based on what we've seen in working with multiple partners on both the vendor side, the CPG side as well as the retail side is a lot of those stakeholders see a trade fund system as very transactional. And that is partially true. There's definitely different aspects of this process that are either regulated or have some requirements of tracing who approved what among other things. So there are certain amounts of things that do have a transactional nature to them. However, the real benefit potential from a solution that allows the retailer and the vendor to partner better together is that they can collaborate on a single platform with a single set of data.So what does that mean? That means that you can be using one version of the truth and not be reliant on chasing forms that might be different versions sitting in emails that someone may or may not have read or they replied with the wrong copy and things change. Retailers and vendors are frequently negotiating back and forth on something like a trade fund, and always having one version of the truth, a consistent set of data that's shared by both parties is really key to the promotional process and saving a lot of back and forth. So that's the transactional part, just getting to the one set of data.But as we advance the technology and with the advent of AI that can mine through that data and also enable sharing of more data both back and forth, it allows not just visibility to the data but visibility to insights, potentially predictive activities and other analysis that could aid that decision-making process between, say, a merchant and an account rep on the vendor side. What's a better promotion? How did this actually do? Obviously, we want to be sensitive in sharing the right data, so you don't want to open up too much, but rather than buy data from a third party that may or may not be representative of what actually happened, why not look for those opportunities to share insightful data back and forth? And I think that's why it's maybe not historically been a competitive advantage; it's been transactional. Obviously, we're looking for those opportunities, looking forward to be more insightful and less transactional.Johnston: And we're starting to get some questions in. So Rich, my next question was for you to ask about the feedback you're getting from your CPG partners, and then we have a question from a manufacturer who's asking, is demand tax only for the retailer or does it offer a two-way communication with the trade partners? So Rich, why don't you talk a little bit about what it's been like with your partners, and then Ryan, if you want to take that and explain.Mendolera: Yes, certainly. Over the years, we meet with our trade partners on a regular basis and top-to-top type meetings where we're planning together and they're very collaborative sessions, but in the past they were, I don't want to say one-sided, but Ryan brought up the point about third-party data and you get a lot of third-party data from manufacturers because that's the access to the information. There's less visibility across that entire view of what is my trade spend and are we aligned? And that's where the conversation really comes into play, and probably this question that came in, you can see some light at the end of the tunnel here. We have had very strategic discussions over the past few years, especially when it comes to two operating companies and best use of trade funds and things like that where we are able to, again, leverage the tools at our disposal to have some very rich conversations.We had a top-top meeting not too long ago with a CPG company, and the rep came in and said, "This is a great promotion. We were running 10 for 10 on this, and we have seen the market share balloon up by 25%. We've got to do this all the time." And it was true, we saw tons of customers come in and it was a great story from that standpoint, but when we looked at the financial aspect of it, there was a little bit of over-investing on the price point and we were able to use the technology again at our disposal to do some predictive analysis and well. What if we change this? Could we optimize the profitability a little bit better on our end, but also not sacrifice the units and the customer intent?And we had that meeting probably maybe 10 months ago. We had a follow-up earlier this year where we tweaked a couple of things between the trade fund itself, as well as how we were going to market with the promotion, and we saw even further market share gains. This time, it was a lot better use of trade spend and trade dollars as well.Johnston: That's a great story. Yeah. Ryan, anything to add to that?O'Halloran: Yeah, I think two things to add to it. One is that the DemandTec platform is an example of a solution that works for both the trade partner, the CPG, as well as the retailer. So, providing insights and providing data to both sides of that equation is definitely important. And I think that was part of the question that was asked as well is, is it one or the other? It's actually for both? And we're looking at increasing our opportunities to be partners on both sides of that equation.Some of the more recent developments and advancements in our solution have actually been for the view and the trade partner or the CPG side of the equation, but it's definitely a two-way situation because your optimal promotion is one that grows the brand and grows the category both in terms of units and in terms of profitability. It's great that you can bring a whole bunch of new volume in, but if you're not making money on it or it's not volume to the category, there's a difference between stealing volume from something else and actually being additive for instance. So that's the ideal promotion that everyone wants to do is actual true incrementality.Johnston: You don't want to just rob Peter to pay Paul.Mendolera: Yeah. That's actually a great point, Ryan, because I do know from our standpoint, we definitely look at that lens. Are we growing the category and we have challenged our trade partners in those top-top meetings, right? It's great if we expanded that market share for that one category or one item for you, but what did that do overall? If we took everybody else out of the market or the category for a long period of time, that's not helping either of us. We want those repeatable purchases and we want to expand the depth of the category. So we certainly leverage that in our promotional planning, but also in our price optimization strategy. Really, our price optimization strategy is solely focused on category growth.Johnston: Ryan, we've talked a little bit about AI, so would like to get your perspective on some of the areas, as you also talk about how you're looking at new opportunities for DemandTec, but really, within the industry and the category. What areas do you see as having the most untapped potential to improve trade and execution?O'Halloran: Well, first of all, everybody's doing AI. That's just table stakes these days. So everyone has some flavor of AI and there are a lot of different ways to apply AI that are just being figured out now. DemandTec is an AI company at inception, and we've done a lot of AI-related work in terms of price and promotion optimization that dates back many years. Machine learning and different related algorithms have been part of our underlying solution for a while, and retailers as a whole have adopted things like that for a while. Newer AI is essentially offering up additional visibility and usually faster, and in a summarized form that can produce, digest and give you synthesized answers a lot quicker and in different mechanics than you would have historically. So it's moving quicker, I guess, is the most important part of that.But really, where does that translate into a promotional life cycle? So if you're a retailer and a vendor partnering on a particular trade fund or category or a particular promotional event cycle, what have you done before? It's great. You can look at that repeated cycle and have that as a comparison or a baseline, but what else are you ignoring because you've just been running the same cycle over and over again? What other alternatives might there be to tweak a couple of the levers, narrow down the possible alternatives, and look at a couple of other things to try, maybe on a smaller scale, maybe on a larger scale? Having the ability to run these different combinations and permutations through a system and then ultimately execute upon them without a lot of additional manual or transactional steps is really important.AI can cut down that time to value or add to the speed to benefit, depending on which way you want to look at it, because you're not going to have to boil the ocean. You can get to a top recommended list similar to search results in a search engine. You don't need all the answers; you just need to know what the top two or three are. And then the merchant and vendor teams can collaborate using that blend of art and science to say, okay, of these couple of choices, I like this one best. Let's try it out.Johnston: Rich, from the retail perspective, a similar question: what are some of the emerging capabilities, some of the emerging technologies that you're excited about that you think are really going to be the most promising to have automation help with?Mendolera: Yeah, certainly. Again, we are using some GenAI capabilities like ChatGPT in our current workflow and trying to streamline those opportunities to really synergize across servicing the operating companies. Today though, that's really done manually. We get the information out of the DemandTec tool in some capacities for communication with other parts of the business. And where we see some emerging technology and AI capabilities is really keep it within the tool and communicating across the business. Let the UI itself direct you and help service you based on the questions that you're asking it to uncover the insights. What is this reaction to this cost change going to do to price, going to do to the category, going to do to the profitability of the brand? And be able to have those communicate immediately over to the merchants and have them bring that back to the trade partner to have discussions around that.So that's a tremendous opportunity to be able to leverage. We understand that there are some strides being made and it is very exciting with the news of DemandTec splitting out and really diving deep from the press release into this area to expand the capabilities. That was music to my ears. We also see some possibilities on our end of taking advantage of some of the new capabilities within the ever-changing DemandTec platform, and it's always changing for the good. A lot of enhancements are coming along the way. We've been playing with our promotional optimization product and are really excited about some of the enhancements we're seeing. On that platform, cost change is also going through some changes that will really benefit us a lot, and then we're excited about the future product development opportunities that DemandTec is looking into. A new item portal submission has been something that we and DemandTec have talked about for a while. So we're really hoping that that comes to fruition in the future to be able to streamline a lot of work there.Johnston: Yeah, no pressure. I want to talk about collaboration. We've talked a little bit about it, but I want to dig into collaboration. I want to talk about what it looks like when it's really good and what it looks like when there needs to be improvements. So Ryan, from your perspective, when we talk about a frictionless promotion planning process, what does that look like when both sides are in sync?O'Halloran: A couple of points on that, and just to echo some of the points Rich made in his last statement too with regard to merchandising teams in general. Retailers do things differently, but a lot of them do things the same as well. And one of the common elements that almost all merchandising, buying and account teams have is that there's a lot of moving parts, there's a lot of data, they're all very busy and there's not a lot of time to debate and think about things. Having synthesized choices, having a common set of metrics, a common set of recommendations, even a consistent baseline of just looking at the same kind of data is important to the process. Merchandising teams frequently want to ask their vendors for something. There's always an ask, right? There's always a need and vendors want to sell more of their products and that's just always going to be there.So, to the extent that both sides of that particular equation can be looking at win-wins, using the same metrics, the same sources of data, and not spending time on transactional things like filling out forms or debating on source of data or differences between source A and source B, to the extent that they can focus on how do we get a mutually beneficial trade fund promotional event together that actually grows the brand and the business and spend less time filling out forms. That's ideal and that's the frictionless we're looking for here. Merchants and buyers are busy, they just want to grow their business and move on to the next week, the next challenge.Johnston: Rich, can you give us an example? Can you really bring this to life to us? When there was a strong collaboration when it actually led to a better promotion or you helped avoid some costly mistake.Mendolera: With strong collaboration, again, we've touched on some of the points around Tops and those kinds of vendor meetings, but really trying to identify the opportunities within the trade spend and trade funding negotiation. The conversations that we've heard from the merchandising side, along with trade partners, is that the times are changing, right? You've got retail media networks and different forms of trade funding that didn't even exist years ago, so now, it's analyzing things, but being able to use the flexibility of the platform to help us direct which buckets to take advantage of within our trade funding and how do we take a look at it? Okay, well, it used to be through cost of goods reduction, but now, it's actually we're going to look at some DNA spend. That all in all will end up net positive or neutral, but the goal is to balance between and the DemandTec platform and our configuration really allows us to monitor that pretty effectively.Mendolera: The most recent examples through the merger in Price Shop or Price Market 32 coming on board to the platform, it was a very tumultuous time and a lot of people see it as risk, right? Oh, what I did before is going to be changed slightly, and people are adverse to change. So, we did a lot of testing, but it was really apparent when we were training the users, the tools built into the platform, there's a lot of error reporting and flexibility and exception type material that comes across the screen that really helped to onboard folks and make it intuitive.Johnston: One of the things that we've talked about is that all of these benefits, they're letting your team focus on strategy now instead of just dealing with spreadsheets and manual processes. What has the shift allowed you to do now that wasn't possible before?Mendolera: For my team personally, we talk about Northeast shared services servicing two operating companies, trying to streamline processes and synergize teams. One of the biggest things that we actually identified pre-merger and has benefited us through this journey was we had a team of category analysts and we had a team of pricing analysts and the merchant would come to us and say, "Hey, the category's down, what's going on? I need a better balance." And then you'd have the category analyst going, "Well, the average unit price is down." Well, is that because it's a pricing piece or is it a promotional piece? And you'd have two analysts having this conversation.So, we recognized with our move to promotional optimization and automating our pricing approach, it actually freed up time for the analysts themselves, formally the pricing analysts, to take on some of the holistic analytical work across the entire category. And we seized that opportunity and our analysts are now tied to a desk and they can go soup to nuts. Is it trade fund? Is it promotional activity? Is it regular retail activity that is causing this dynamic to occur in the category? Which, for us, has been a great aha because we're able to streamline the process, but it betters the communication and has, again, helped us transition through this time really in a fast-paced way.Johnston: Exciting days.O'Halloran: Yeah. And to add onto that, being able to look at data in real time and across the functions is important. Being able to help determine why something worked or didn't work is complicated in retail sometimes. There's usually more than one reason and being able to decipher, is it everyday price, is it promotion, is it some other aspect that wasn't executed as originally planned? All of this starts by having shared access to the right data and timely data. You want to know before you do it again, if there were issues so that you can address it before, whether it's a print cycle or some other cutoff that's upcoming, you want to know pretty timely what's going on so that you don't continue to repeat any potential missteps or that you can tweak things before you have to do it again.Johnston: So, we are going to move into the Q&A in just a minute, but before we do, Ryan, I have just one final question for you when we're talking about all these challenges. So for companies that are still managing their promotions manually, what are some red flags that it's really time for them to modernize? And if they had to just start somewhere, what's your advice?O'Halloran: I would say as a former retailer myself, if you see your teams are in that pattern of just repeating last year and annualizing it, chances are, you've got some opportunities. And it doesn't mean last year's wrong, it just might mean that there are some tweaks or there are some things you could try on a smaller scale or try to manipulate some of the different levers in different ways. Having tools and having systems and access to data that allow you to do that and explore those in a sandbox before you try them and then ultimately, try them and measure them, that's usually a best practice in a way you can alleviate that. So just trial and error a little bit, but use your data; data-driven decision making is very important.Johnston: Great. Okay. So we are going to move into Q&A. Again, I encourage you, use the Q&A function, drop your questions in right there. If for some reason we can't get to them, one of the speakers will follow up through email. So really encourage you to weigh in. So we've been promoting this webinar and we did get a question from one of the CGT texting subscribers from a manufacturer, and they wanted to talk about, Rich, if you're able to answer how you're embedding e-commerce data into your promotion planning models? They ask for example, are online prices including voluntary and involuntary promo prices in the model? And how are you refactoring the impact of retail media investments in PTP quality into your promo price impact?Mendolera: Yeah. So within the information that we send to and receive back from DemandTec, we send causal information so we know how the purchase was made, we're able to marry that up again within our own internal systems as well to the e-commerce methodology, whether it's pickup delivery, if somebody even was purchasing the product in store but hit the website. There's a lot of analysis that we do along that, and then we can marry that up to "was it more profitable to sell this through our e-commerce platform or would we have liked to have brought them into the store?" So we do that analysis and we do have that data flowing through the system and able to provide some of that information back in DemandTec to our trade partners if those performance codes are chosen. And that's the deal that we executed. So we do track that.And then from retail media networks, again, it's a little bit different. Sometimes, not necessarily going through the platform, but we do have the opportunity for that DNA activity to be registered, and then we monitor it from that perspective. But certainly, it's a story that needs a bridge between what those legacy performance activities have been and then moving forward into how business is done today. So we're always looking at the opportunity to tweak our configuration and leverage the tool to dive a little bit deeper into that.O'Halloran: Yeah. And just to echo one point there, having the causal information and understanding multi-channel or omni-channel type promotions and strategies is definitely important to the process because the consumer is being exposed to things at multiple different points, understanding which ones are causal and which ones are just nice to know is definitely part of that decision-making process.Johnston: Rich, we have a question: what has it been like in merging your consumer data and your customer information, and with your actual shipment data in the same environment?Mendolera: We have different platforms where we have our household information or just our point of sale data, and then being able to look at sell-through from what the shipments were, distributions to stores. From a trade funding standpoint and a promotional planning standpoint, we definitely look at what the shipment information tells us and what the sales were and then marry that back to, all right, what is a cadence for promotion during the season? I'm thinking seasonal candy is a great example of this, where we have always been able to leverage, we get the deal, we know what that is, but we've always been able to leverage, all right, where are we with the shipment data and the sell through, and then how does that marry up to when we built our promotions, went to the deeper discounts, did we have to do a markdown? And we capture that again, through the promotional planning tools.So we're able to go back to past information and see how that aligned last year with, do we need to tweak that strategy for the next selling season or repeat the season from the year prior? What were the learnings that we could take advantage of?Johnston: Makes sense. Okay. I think we have time for one more question. So Ryan, I'd like to end on just some best practices for the audience. So, seems like a lot of in our audience are really at the onset of their journey, still in early stages. So for those people, what's your advice to them? How can they avoid creating new silos as they're moving from these manual processes to new automated processes?O'Halloran: Yeah. So, share knowledge, of course. Partnering with your suppliers directly is important. Sharing data. Trust but verify is important as a general statement with most automation and AI solutions as well. So being able to share a little bit of the why and see that data behind the decisions is a good way to avoid creating a silo. Because if the why is understood and agreed across the parties, you're less likely to have two different opinions on a particular matter that might have a pretty clear mutual benefit.Merchandising and retailing in general is an art and science type of decision. So to the extent that you can have data-driven decisions help inform what's going on, it can augment very experienced buying and selling teams by providing maybe some new ways of working, but also some insights that maybe weren't immediately visible in the old ways of working. So essentially, partnership across boundaries is probably the easiest way to avoid the silo, but to the extent that everyone's looking at the same thing in the same place, it's certainly a lot harder to be siloed when it's all saying the same thing. So that would be my general guidance.Johnston: Definitely great words to leave us with. So we are unfortunately out of time for today, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap things up. So I want to thank DemandTec for sponsoring today's webinar. Rich and Ryan, I want to thank you both for giving us your time and your subject matter expertise.O'Halloran: Thank you everybody. Thanks, Rich.Mendolera: Thank you.

How Northeast Grocery Modernized Its Trade Execution Processes

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