Smarter promotions for better margins and less waste
Change the trade promotion game by leveraging the combination of retail data sources and smart algorithms
Data-driven collaboration for a profitable and sustainable supply chain.
Trade promotion planning is a high-stakes cycle that returns several times every year, yet it remains a process that has never been fully addressed. Despite consuming a massive portion of the annual marketing budget and serving as a critical driver of growth, the process is often stuck in the past—leaving category teams trapped in repetitive manual routines and held back by outdated tools.
This project introduces an intelligent tool designed to bridge the gap between producer and retailer data. By replacing manual work with scalable AI insights, the annual promotion cycle is transformed from a recurring bottleneck into a clear operational advantage.
Breaking the Spreadsheet Bottleneck
For most category managers, promotion planning hasn't evolved. You are expected to make high-stakes investment decisions, yet the tools at your disposal are holding you back.
The reality today is a "spreadsheet bottleneck." Modeling historic promotions in manual trackers is a grueling, time-consuming process. Because it takes so much effort to clean data and build manual models, time becomes your biggest enemy. There simply isn’t enough of it to evaluate every past event or simulate future scenarios regularly.
This means you’re often forced to rely on last year’s recycled assumptions or "gut feeling" rather than evidence. When promotions aren't simulated and optimized, money is left on the table. You shouldn't have to choose between speed and accuracy.
Lead with Intelligence
This project delivers a dedicated promotion planning and simulation interface, giving suppliers the power to plan and simulate scenarios by leveraging all the data at their disposal. By replacing static, backward-looking spreadsheets with a forward-looking module, the platform empowers you to take full control of your strategy:
- Up to 90% Forecast Accuracy: In live testing, the price elasticity forecasting model achieved an accuracy rate up to 90%. This level of precision allows you to plan with total confidence, avoiding costly surprises and ensuring your supply chain is aligned with predicted demand.
- Stop Leaving Money on the Table: Instead of relying on recycled assumptions, the simulation module identifies the exact patterns that drive performance. Our pilot partners used these insights to compare modeled promotions and prioritize activities with the greatest expected return, ensuring marketing budgets are invested, not just spent.
- Real-Time Simulation: The pilot demonstrated that adjusting a discount or shifting a timeline can now be modeled in minutes. This agility allows you to respond to retailer requests with evidence, ensuring every decision is backed by a data-led forecast rather than a manual calculation.
- Automated Data Integration: The manual grind is eliminated. By merging diverse data structures into one stream of truth, the interface frees up the time you need to move from data-entry to strategic leadership.
Empowering the Category Manager
- Stop Leaving Money on the Table: By simulating different mechanics—like discount depth, promo mechanisms and retail media—you can find the "sweet spot" that maximizes margin and volume.
- Validate Your Strategy with Evidence: Use AI-driven insights to pre-validate the impact of promotions. When a retailer asks for extra investment, you can respond with a data-backed "yes" or "no" in minutes, not days.
- Eliminate Waste: Lead a more sustainable operation by steering your supply chain based on actual predicted uplift, ensuring you have the right stock in the right place without the oversupply.
- Decide Faster: A single source of truth enables a factual, confident dialogue with retailers, accelerating the adoption of your category plans.
Status: Proven and Ready to Scale
The pilot phase of this project is now successfully delivered. Our initial partners have already replaced manual guesswork with high-accuracy models, proving that the technology works in the real world.
We are now actively scaling this solution to more retailers and producers across the sector. Our mission is to help every category team move from manual data-entry to strategic leadership, giving you total control over your trade promotions.
This project was partly funded with money from the EU. For more information about the project visit the project page on the Interreg website
Article written by
Guus van Heijningen
