Retail Solutions
Downstream Data Management For Increased ROI

Retailers and their consumer products partners have long struggled to ensure store shelves are always stocked with the right amount of product, at the right place and at the right time. Despite the industry's best efforts to identify and track the root cause of inventory issues, out-of-stock rates still hover in the 8-10 percent range and often double during promotional periods. Manufacturers need near realtime data and accurate demand signals to properly forecast consumer demand and meet the on-shelf replenishment needs of their retailer partners. Retail Solutions (RSi), headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., caters to leading consumer products companies by developing and delivering a suite of Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) solutions that turn daily retailer downstream data like point-ofsale (POS), supply chain, merchandiser feedback and category data, into actionable visibility in the store and on the shelf.

The privately held firm by CEO and founder Jonathan Golovin acts as a value-added conduit between retailer and supplier, fostering a collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship where data is shared and acted upon. “We collect, load, cleanse, harmonize and create value from billions of data points on products every day. This new level of insight helps brands to increase sales, reduce out-of stocks, improve promotion execution and effectiveness, maximize retail operation productivity and ensure products are always available to consumers when they are ready to make a purchase,” explains Golovin.

As RSi’s largest customers track across thousands of stores, the company gathers billions of data points on products every day. Large retailers give their POS data to RSi, which RSi then aggregates and provides to brands so they can maximize their understanding of what products are selling and why.

The global technology provider of cloud-based, Big Data analytics and real-time intelligence for the consumer products industry has created over 50 global use cases to tackle retailer and supplier pain points in areas such as New Product Introductions (NPI), Item Assortment Optimization, Promotion Effectiveness, Retail Operations Price Optimization, Service Level Improvement, Forecast Accuracy and many others to aid their customers and retailer partners.

Retail Solutions is a major player in this space due to its proven scientific approach to downstream data, the depth of its offerings, and the company's commitment to collaboration with industry partners and end-users.

The company provides customers with Daily POS Reporting as well as Out of Stock & Vendor Manage Inventory (VMI) Applications among others that help users in understanding and analyzing daily sales performance, categorizing the sales output on every product, store and day. More than 500 global CPG companies, including 22 of the top 25 manufacturers in the world subscribe to RSi’s cloud-based platform to monitor and manage the performance of their brands. RSi's reach covers POS data from 80 retailers in 130,000 locations worldwide. Top global brands including 3M, Abbott, Bausch & Lomb, Bayer, Colgate-Palmolive, Clorox, Heineken, HP, Kraft, Nestle, Novartis, Procter & Gamble, Schering-Plough and Unilever have helped Retail Solutions in gaining international recognition and growth in this industry.

"Suppliers want real-time data. Retailers want strategic insights. They both do it to increase revenue,” says Golovin. RSi envisions that the increased availability of retail data such as POS, inventory, EPC, merchandiser feedback, customer loyalty and many other types of downstream data fuel new opportunities, new value propositions and the potential to grow effective collaborative processes between consumer goods companies and retailers. RSi believes in maximizing the ROI of daily actions, which drives and responds to consumer demand, through cloud-based applications, demand intelligence and data integration.