Chicago – September 22, 2004 – Continuing its business transformation and increasing the value and relevance of marketplace information, Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) today unveiled plans for the CPG and retail industry’s first Content-on-Demand Factory. As the leading global provider of content, analytic services and Business Performance Management (BPM) solutions to the consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, and healthcare industries, IRI is pushing forward aggressively to provide the information, analytics, and technology that today’s manufacturers and retailers need to compete and grow profits in a challenging consumer environment.
The CPG and retail industry faces challenges of lackluster growth and increasing competition for the consumer’s spend. To stay competitive in this slow-growth market, manufacturers and retailers must be able to have a comprehensive, real-time view of their markets. They must be able to:
- Quickly identify and exploit consumer behavior trends
- Recognize early buying trends by individual consumer groups
- Anticipate demand by geography or demographic sub-segment
- Quickly synthesize multiple views of the market to provide a better view of customers
- Collaborate to appeal effectively to the consumer and maximize in-store execution
- Shape targeted promotions to selected buyers
- Respond quickly to pending out-of-stock situations
- Quickly monitor promotion results
- Provide suppliers advance notice of inventory needs
- Recognize opportunities to move products with price promotion
The new capabilities derived from IRI’s Content-on-Demand Factory will significantly improve the speed, flexibility, and data quality currently provided, giving manufacturers and retailers a real-time, comprehensive view of their market. Using state-of-the art data management technology to process the volumes of data coming from daily retail, shipment, inventory, and consumer data updates, IRI plans to provide companies with the ability to make real-time decisions and give them a competitive edge.
Companies will receive a much more accurate view of sales trends. They will gain real-time feedback of promotion success, in-stock conditions, and sales yields. They will have visualization tools and analytics modeling to quickly sift through data to spot key trends and root cause issues. For the first time, they’ll have an easy way to create a composite view of their market that turns market data into actionable business insight.
“Our clients have told us that they’ve seen the value of traditional market data erode as the pace of business increases,” said Romesh Wadhwani, IRI’s Chairman. “IRI is out to transform the way manufacturers and retailers think about their businesses—and having real-time data and insight into root-cause issues is fundamental to that transformational thinking. Our Content-on-Demand Factory is the way the industry is going to get there.”
“Delivery of daily data and the supporting applications dramatically increases the value IRI is able to deliver to its customers,” said Scott W. Klein, IRI President and CEO. “Our investment in these next-generation data processing capabilities will deliver great competitive advantage to our clients, by providing them with true real-time insights and analytics to more effectively drive their business. This is an important element towards our commitment to help our industry reinvent itself.”
Developed in partnership with Acxiom Corporation, a world-class information management company, the Content-on-Demand Factory is based on a powerful state-of-the-art grid computing architecture enabling IRI to deliver daily data from select named retailers and InfoScan® data approximately three times faster than today. The new capabilities will enable retailers and manufacturers to more effectively segment, visualize, and analyze market data and gain deeper, more relevant insights leading to actions more flexibly, on-demand, and in real time.
IRI’s Content-on-Demand Factory is currently under development. Initial customer pilots are scheduled for early 2005.
About Information Resources, Inc.
Information Resources, Inc. is the leading global provider of market content, analytic services and Business Performance Management (BPM) solutions to the CPG, retail and healthcare industries. IRI's clients include the leading CPG, retail, and healthcare companies in the world. IRI's market content and analytic services provide these companies with market and consumer insights. IRI's BPM solutions uniquely combine its breakthrough enterprise analytics software, market content and analytic models to provide a total view of the market and to enable maximum business performance across marketing, sales and operations. IRI's solutions enable the consumer-driven real-time CPG and retail enterprise. More information is available at www.infores.com.