One Demand Signal, Endless Growth: EI Hypercube Redefines Retail Success
Finally, a solution that addresses retail challenges, produces measurable results, and provides long-term strategic value, without adding complexity.
Retail and consumer brand executives seek smarter ways to optimize performance across key business areas like pricing, inventory, and forecasting. At The Parker Avery Group, we deliver solutions that meet these challenges, produce measurable results, and provide long-term strategic value.
As part of this commitment, we are excited to share some major updates on our Enterprise Intelligence (EI) Hypercube platform. These updates are solely focused on delivering greater value to our retail and consumer brand clients, without adding unnecessary complexity or cost across technology stacks and teams.
Greater Value for Retailers
Here are the key value propositions of Parker Avery’s EI Hypercube platform, designed to help retailers drive better results while staying agile, efficient, and cost-effective, without adding complexity:
Improved Accuracy
Algorithms like the harmonic analysis-based imputation deliver higher precision, resulting in better operational performance outcomes.
Agility and Scalability
Dynamic dashboards and GenAI tools empower teams to respond rapidly to business needs.
Cost-Effectiveness
Our results-as-a-service model eliminates hefty implementation costs and minimizes ongoing IT demands.
Client-Centric Flexibility
Fixed pricing and short exit clauses lower risk for clients, fostering trust and long-term collaboration and relationships.
Amplified Outcomes: Unified Demand Signal
This year, we have focused on refining our unified demand signal, which is crucial for helping retailers and brands optimize pricing, inventory, and other outcomes. One major leap forward in this area is improved demand signal imputation.
In collaboration with harmonic analysis experts, we developed an algorithm that reduces imputation errors by an impressive 40–60%. Tested across multiple datasets with hundreds of simulations, this enhancement significantly boosts EI Hypercube’s functionality and accuracy in key business areas such as lost sales tracking and demand forecasting.
Further, we’ve added advanced modeling techniques, such as Bayesian modeling and congruence measures, to better estimate demand for new products and distribution and ensure more stable and reliable forecasts.
Retailer Impact
Retailers want better forecasting accuracy, and the 40–60% reduction in imputation errors is a game-changer. This accuracy improvement could lead to self-funding opportunities, directly correlating to reductions in labor and inventory costs. This improvement significantly enhances the value proposition for clients. However, EI Hypercube’s optimization capabilities remain the primary differentiator, helping retailers connect the dots between planning and execution—a challenge even the largest retailers are still working to solve fully.
Platform Enhancements: New Capabilities Optimize Results
We’ve also made several platform enhancements to improve user experience and business impact. These updates have two key layers: optimization and collaboration.
Optimization Layer Improvements
- Faster and More Precise Optimization: We’ve improved the multiple-objective optimization, enabling faster and more accurate results across various business scenarios.
- New Frameworks: We’ve introduced new capabilities for regular price optimization and markdown management, equipped with scenario analysis tools and GenAI-enabled competitor insights to enhance decision-making.
- Markdown Optimization: Includes “inventory at risk” reporting to support data-driven markdown strategies.
Retailer Impact
The ability to run multiple scenarios quickly and efficiently is a major advantage for retailers. As one executive described, the focus should be on rapid decision-making rather than getting bogged down by the pursuit of perfect accuracy. This “rough-cut planning” approach, followed by precision validation, aligns with how many retailers prefer to operate. Retailers see great value in simulating scenarios that assess impacts on key metrics such as margin, units, or revenue. This feature will drive faster, more informed decision-making for day-to-day operations and strategic planning.
Collaboration Layer Improvements
- Dynamic Dashboard Filtering: Provides user-friendly, customizable insights.
- Gen AI-Driven User Interface: Enhances decision-making by democratizing analytics.
- Usability Features: Including locking mechanisms to ensure process integrity in demand planning.
GenAI: Augmentation Over Automation
We believe in GenAI’s power not as a replacement for human judgment but as an augmentation tool. Our tools already evaluate scenarios and process data, and we are advancing toward full recommendation engines that provide actionable strategies.
EI Hypercube’s features empower decision-makers with actionable insights that help close revenue gaps, optimize gross margins with precision, and enhance their ability to make informed decisions.
Examples of How GenAI is Integrated into the Hypercube Platform
Inform
Provide straightforward answers to user queries based on Hypercube data.
Example: “What are my highest price elasticity classes?”
Example: “What is my sell-through rate by subclass?”
Process Information
Conduct simple analyses on a subset of data using basic agents.
Example: Perform Pareto analysis on SKU sales within a hierarchical level.
Example: Analyze lost sales across a merchandise class linked to an event.
Evaluate Options
Run simulations to explore scenarios based on user queries.
Example: Assess margin, unit, and revenue impacts of a proposed price discount.
Example: Analyze changes in mix percentage for a suggested promotion.
Suggest Options
EvaluatE and recommend solutions to user-defined challenges.
Example: Identify strategies to recover a $2 million revenue gap between actuals and plan.
Example: Propose ways to maintain sales and address a gross margin shortfall within the current OTB budget.
Retailer Impact
GenAI within the EI Hypercube enhances decision-making by delivering immediate, data-driven insights. This enables retailers to evaluate pricing, inventory, and sales strategies quickly. Retailers can simulate various scenarios, assess their impact, and receive actionable recommendations to optimize revenue, margins, and inventory. This helps them make more confident, strategic decisions that drive tangible results.
Enhancing Client Value: Results-as-a-Service
Our evolving value-based strategy focuses on providing results-as-a-service (RaaS) to ensure long-term, impactful client partnerships over traditional technology projects. As an extension of your team, we work together to solve critical retail challenges without burdening your IT department.
Our unique RaaS approach reduces complexity through the following:
- There are no implementation costs.
- Fixed monthly pricing with a three-month opt-out clause ensures flexibility.
- Cloud-hosted and fully maintained solutions reduce the operational overhead on client teams, including data cleansing and seamless upgrades.
Retailer Impact
Our RaaS approach is particularly attractive for retailers with constrained budgets. However, more sophisticated retailers may still prefer on-premise solutions for security and customization reasons. Implementing deeper integrations and data plug-ins for commonly used platforms would greatly enhance the appeal of this approach. This flexibility in execution ensures Parker Avery is a partner capable of serving a broad spectrum of retail clients.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Retail Efficiency
These improvements deliver solutions that address your most pressing challenges without adding complexity. Parker Avery’s EI Hypercube platform is designed to meet the needs of retail leaders, whether it’s improving demand forecasting and planning accuracy, enhancing collaboration across teams, or harnessing GenAI for better business insights.
We look forward to continuing to support retailers and consumer brands with cutting-edge solutions that drive efficiency, optimize outcomes, and keep you ahead in an increasingly competitive market.
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