Retail Category Management FAQ
How can SOLYS help me identify opportunities and make recommendations to my retailer?
Not only will you be able to be more responsive to your retailer's questions, but you'll be able to propose suggestions to help increase sales, and provide solutions to avoid lost sales. You'll be viewed as the expert. SOLYS provides reports and scorecards with all the critical information that team members need to be a value to the retailer and to your company.
How can I customize SOLYS for my specific business needs?
You'll find that it's easy to customize SOLYS using the item attributing, custom groupings and saved reporting capabilities. You can easily attribute items from the Administration panel, creating custom item groupings and reports that reflect the way you view your business.You cancustomize using category specific attributing and category specific reporting. SOLYS also gives you complete control over brand mappings and can change them "on the fly." You can also create a custom report and save it as a template to run the same report each week.
Can I scorecard my category?
Yes. SOLYS contains built-in category scorecards in multiple styles and data types.
Can I compare sales pre- and post-transition, and track share?
Yes. You'll be able to run a report in just seconds. It's just as fast to learn how to run a report. SOLYS is designed to run reports from a single Report Builder screen - so you only need to learn how to manage the Main Screen to run any type of report. From there you can build a report and run it again to compare answers. Because it's so easy to learn and to generate reports, you'll find yourself digging deeper into your data to get even more information on which to base business decisions.
How quickly will I be able to run a SOLYS report?
You'll be able to run a report in just seconds. Learning how to build a report is just as fast. SOLYS is designed tocreate reports from a single Report Builder screen—so you only need to learn how to manage the Main Screen to run any type of report. From there you can build a report and run it again to compare answers. Because it's so easy to learn and to generate reports, you'll find yourself digging deeper into your data to get even more information on which to base business decisions.
How do I keep my data current and accurate?
A SOLYS administrator on your team updates data each time it is made available by your retailer. Typically, data accuracy is only an issue if the retailer makes an unannounced change to their formatting. However, even then, our support staff will quickly troubleshoot the data to ensure its accuracy. If you're using SOLYS on your laptop, but your team has a central database that resides on a server, SOLYS will automatically update your laptop to reflect the latest changes to your central database.
What level of data will I be able to access?
SOLYS is compatible at store, chain or group (i.e., distribution centers) level data. In fact, you can quickly and easily switch back and forth between data levels at any time. For example, you can view a particular item at the chain level, then view the store level detail for that item.
Can I use competitive data in the system?
SOLYS will work with the category data your retailer provides. You can set permission levels for which type of data your individual team members can view, so only the category captain will have access to that data.
Can I have syndicated data integrated into the SOLYS system?
Yes.