Category Management Series: New Merchandizing Tool To Boost Category Planning

High Tech company Dassault Systèmes has been working for a long time now on a new merchandizing tool addressed to retailer. The purpose is to propose the most updated technologies in the merchandizing plan process. As you can clearly see in the video, the new tool developped by Dassault allow both the suppliers and retailers to have a great vision on what a merchandizing plan will look like in the real life, thanks to 3D.

I also know that Unilever has been working in different countries with such a tool, but I wanted to share with you this video to clearly show you what the future of merchandizing will be.

I have also seen a great tool at Les Journées de L'IFM, allowing someone to use its mobile phone to take pictures of each elements of a store, than to process it to have extensive data of the product range in one store. I have seen also some tools allowing someone to create a merchandizing plan in minutes simply by giving information on the merchandizing tactics to use (raise sales, profit, limit stock outs...).

Those initiatives are great, because I still believe that the operationnal process of merchandizing is still too slow to have a good strategy about it.