Revionics Upgrades Life Cycle Price Op Solutions

Revionics, Inc., a Roseville, Calif.-based provider of retail life cycle price optimization solutions, has launched the latest release of its suite of products with functionality and usability enhancements it says are designed to help retailers increase sales, profits, and customer loyalty.

"Leading retailers are looking to price optimization solutions to provide price recommendations based on consumer insight to increase revenue, profit, and margin dollars," said Kevin Sterneckert, VP, consumer value chain, Gartner. "Price optimization across the price life cycle -- base price, promotion, and markdown -- drives measurable value and delaying adoption may create a distinct market disadvantage."

The new release provides enhancements across the Revionics’ Price Optimization, Promotion Optimization and Markdown Optimization products. New capabilities include:

Expanded actionable insights to drive better decision making and improve ROI:

• Advanced Scenario Planning to take into consideration factors including seasonality, future costs, and assortment to further strengthen the category review and pre-season planning and workflow.
• Dynamic Markdown Clustering that provides recommendations to group stores by markdown event - not by usual store zones. This enables retailers to optimize the impact of markdowns by taking into consideration factors such as competition and weather and maximize the margins on their inventory.
• Comprehensive promotion planning and optimization across all channels -- including social media -- to enable retailers to determine what are the right products to promote, through which promotional vehicle, at what price, and when.
• Multiple reporting enhancements including the improved ability to compare forecasts to actual results in a variety of ways, accurately track how many prices buyers are taking, rejecting, etc. at the product level and allocate vendor specific sales forecasts in vendor level forecasts (by item-zone-vendor).

Increased transparency accelerating confidence by explaining the 'why?' behind all recommendations:

• Elasticity confidence factor is provided to help retailers interpret an item's relative elasticity value and the impact it has on pricing recommendations.
• Audit reports that track all pricing configuration changes -- who changed what, when, and why.

Improved usability to further increase adoption and productivity:

• Enhanced customizable views and navigation capabilities that include drag & drop and advanced filter criteria options to make pricing reviews easier.

"The enhancements to the Revionics solution -- including the what-if scenario planning capabilities and pre-season planning functionality -- were particularly important and timely as we have been reviewing and managing our pricing strategies in this inflationary economy over the past year," said Steve Luoma, director of pricing, Family Dollar Stores.

According to Revionics, the upgraded solution helps deliver customer-centric pricing which incorporates preferences and buying activities compels a retailer to understand how consumers are behaving by store, by channel, and how they shop by item.