More Power with Point of Sales Data

More Power with Point of SaleS Data By Mike Borgos O O f all the arrows in the demand planner’s quiver of tactical forecasting approaches, Point of Sales (POS) data may be the most frequently overlooked and is probably the most underutilized. If your company sells to any of the major retail chains, you can be confident that your marketing and sales organizations are already conversant with the language and logic of POS. If you are not participating in that conversation, then you are missing out on a highly valuable yet readily available source of forecast data and insight. a PoS PriMer With the advent of electronic cash registers, it became possible to capture data on individual retail transactions and store them in databases for subsequent analysis. It didn’t take long for retailers to realize that such information had value far beyond the purview of the accounting department. Once the retailers’ merchandising and logistics departments got hold of this information, it took only a few short, inevitable steps to bring us to the current world of data mining, loyalty marketing, vendor-managed inventories, and category management, to cite just a few of our contemporary business ...