Monthly Reports are an important element of Category Management and should be a key resource for decision making and action planning in businesses. They are also sometimes seen as an ongoing drain on time and resource each month. Some of this possibly comes from the ongoing input every month and perceived limited returns
Why Reporting is important?
Regardless of how much data you have, how frequently it's delivered, whether it's coming from internal, external or free sources you need a point in the month to review performance and answer the following questions.
· How are you performing compared to the total market?
· If you are behind, why are you behind? If you are ahead, why are you ahead?
· Most importantly what actions are you going to take on the back of this information?
· These questions are important from a total business perspective as it will also explain why the business is deviating both positively or negatively from budget or forecast.
Making monthly reports more accessible
Is your monthly report working for those who need it? Are people reading it and using it? The best way to get to the bottom of this is to ask. Request feedback on the content and layout. Are people reading it? Are stakeholders using it in other meetings? If so with who and when? Are there other occasions this information is needed and slight tweak in the content and layout would help? Reporting can take a lot of time and resource maximising the return on this is important.
The gold standard would be to present the content on a monthly basis to the key stakeholders or embed it as part of other monthly review meetings. If you are presenting ensure there is space for people to ask questions and drive for actions at the end. Suggest some actions as a result and prompt the stakeholders for more.
Ensure people know how important monthly reporting is and the actions that can be created from it. It’s a conversation topic with customers, seeing what other retailers or competitors doing and delving into the why might spark ideas in your own business. If something is changing in you market this is the space to find out why, it also gives you knowledge and prepares you for going into meetings with customers. If you are not performing in line with the marker it’s a way to delve into why and do something about it
Getting the Content Right
In my time I have seen many different versions of essentially the same information. Too much or too little content often comes down to how different people like to work which is why getting feedback is important but not just doing it once, do it ongoing every 3-6 months to ensure it's still meeting the stakeholders needs. Having details people can lift and use with other stakeholders is really helpful. If there are elements of your report that are for internal use only make that very clear.
What if you have limited data available?
If your business is purchasing limited amounts of data or none there are other things you can do on monthly basis to create the report. What's happening in your customers? New products, promotions, price changes? These are all things that could go into the report. There is total market data available from data agencies such as Kantar who publish UK retail market shares every month. See below.
For account specific reporting you could use EPOS data from your customers to add more layers of reporting. You could also work with your accounts team to see they could provide you with extracts that you could breakdown into channels, customers or types of store to add more layers. There will be something you could do it will just demand more creative thinking.
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