Facing the increasing variety of products in the cotton era, how does the company design a reasonable product matrix?

In the digital age, how to obtain the digital operation ability of products from R&D to the whole supply chain with one click through efficient digital tools is a problem that many brands think about. At the same time, in the face of the accelerated iteration of people and goods yard, how to capture the corresponding market changes of consumer demand in time has put forward a test for maternal and child enterprises. Recently, Zhou Ping, the consulting director of new retail industry of Centric software, gave the answer through a series of practical exercises and cases at the "The Power of Diligence 202 1 Seventh Future Maternal and Child Conference and Cherry Award Annual Festival" sponsored by Maternal and Child Industry Watch. The following is a wonderful speech:

Author/Zhou Ping

We are a PLM software company headquartered in Silicon Valley, USA, serving customers in various fields of retail FMCG, including clothing, food, cosmetics, toys and electronic products. For eight consecutive years, the average annual growth rate was 60%. On 202 1 12, Secco acquired Armonica Retail, a European innovative retail planning solution provider. Its end-to-end solution covers commodity financial planning, scope planning, product selection and procurement planning, store distribution and replenishment, forecasting and supplier replenishment, distribution planning and forecasting, etc. , is the digital version of Centric PLM, Centric Visual Innovation Platform (CVIP) and Centric. The strong alliance between Armonica and Centric will help enterprises coordinate the integrated process from planning, development, delivery to omni-channel sales, and from design to retail, achieving unprecedented speed.

How to make explosions?

When we do consulting projects, many enterprises will encounter two problems:

First of all, my inventory turnover rate is very well controlled. Why do e-commerce departments or marketing departments keep selling some unsalable goods? Why can't many goods be sold without promotion? Do you want to keep looking for explosives? What products can be taken out of the full SKU library to explode the inventory?

Second, what can be done to better support products to impress consumers' minds? For example, in the field of beauty cosmetics, from her economy and other economies to gender-free cosmetics, maternal and child educational toys have expanded from the previous 2-6 years old to 0- 12 years old or even longer customer coverage groups. From this, we will find that the traditional people's freight yard, the people's freight yard in the era of 1.0 and the people's freight yard in the era of 2.0, is very different.

For example, a customer said that his inventory turnover rate must be healthy. We just asked a question, do you have any explosives in your inventory? He said no, we found a situation, many explosive products sell well, even out of stock, but there may be many non-explosive products or products with low market conversion rate in stock, so we must find ways to promote them. The impact on consumers' minds will be very different from the original product mix selling point.

Many customers have internal customer management software, enterprise information and supply chain software, and also want to expand their categories based on explosions. In the process of constantly looking for market selling points and hot spots, great internal friction will occur. What happened?

First of all, from the perspective of perception. Through digital tools, marketing agencies or private domain operations, the description of consumer portraits is subdivided and then labeled. From the market point of view, market research, user insight and product strategy should have a clear direction. But often the fact is that after I have a direction, I can't find a more successful product library with market conversion rate.

Secondly, in terms of responsiveness, product managers, outsourced R&D or OEMs cannot control the degree of project follow-up in their own laboratories. From this point of view, the market research and private domain training done in the early stage were wasted because they missed the best time to market the products.

Many customers we serve have made great efforts in brand marketing and production. From the perspective of product quality compliance and audit coordination, the original product marketing plan is restored to develop selling points, including whether the taste and function can well meet the original marketing forecast. Based on this logic, the internal iteration of products is continuous, so from the perspective of explosive products, it is unscientific for an enterprise to blindly pursue every product as an explosive product. A good product system is that there is continuous transformation power in explosives, and explosives will have a long research and development cycle, and explosives can also be combined with other extended categories. Therefore, the opinion given by explosive products is that we should continue to do better cultivation from the aspects of technology, materials, design and scene service on the basis of explosive products. For cross-category, it is suggested to be very cautious and adopt a scientific attitude, and the profit rate can be improved based on the combination of cross-SPU.

In the future product matrix management, enterprises need to pay attention to three key capabilities:,

First, how to refine the selling points through data and turn them into product research and development.

Second, in the process of R&D, the cooperation of multiple projects and the transparency of sub-projects under the project team, for enterprise management, we should pay great attention to the preparation of materials in the project and the quotation of suppliers. Accordingly, from supply chain preparation to product planning and time arrangement, we must cooperate in many ways to run products efficiently.

Third, it comes from technology and innovation. Based on big data and perfect commodity matrix, it is very important to guide marketing quickly, thus reducing the unsalable rate and inventory of commodities.

Open the full link with the digital service center station.

Traditional PLM includes digital R&D library and knowledge base of many enterprises, from product design, conception and development to process guidance and product iteration in the process. What are these data interspersed with? I need to see through it. Based on this, we can substitute materials, for example, the materials and formulas in the food industry directly affect the total cost. For example, when an enterprise makes a business plan, if a certain price segment wants to become a brand moat, it can sacrifice a certain product profit, so that the packaging design can hit the target customer base, and many products will be tried and tested, reviewed and revised. This process is called basic product collaboration. Based on product synergy, let's see why these products can hit the consumer groups well.

In the past, when analyzing consumer portraits, we often said 15 to 20 years old, 25 to 30 years old, and what level of age consumption stage is our target customer. But these are all very thick, and there will be more refinement. For example, many consumers may spend a lot of money on a pair of limited edition sports shoes, but the cheaper jeans, the better. Therefore, we don't have to locate consumers completely according to the user's portrait, but we need to see what is the difference between my materials and technology and my competitive products, and where is my advantage. For example, a product pays attention to the efficacy of a certain flavor formula, and finally falls on the sales data. How much deviation from the initial forecast can be repeatedly scrutinized. Another example is whether some core products can bring out peripheral products together, such as blind boxes. We combine many single items into large products, and then we have to estimate how much we will sell in the early stage. Is each product combination 1+ 1 greater than 2 or 3, and what is the percentage from EU standards to domestic standards? After these points are put on the market in the later stage, it is necessary to look at the original business plan and product layout in turn.

So in this process, we need a digital business center, including whether there is data consistency between the R&D process and the product after sale, and whether the product can be re-launched within ten minutes. This is a big problem.

Let's share a few cases.

Pulcoton

As we all know, many enterprises are shrinking in the epidemic stage, especially in digital investment. In the cotton era, ERP and supply chain in the early stage invested a lot of money. Only in the product life cycle, Mr. Li (Li) personally participated in the product selection process. Because from the beginning of cotton, breathability and purity are all signals, how to let consumers experience through products, and at the same time relying on a single product explosion is not enough to support the growth of geometric business, it is definitely necessary to substitute more scenes to cover the product life cycle, consumer life cycle and various scenes, which is a great challenge for his internal product manager and R&D procurement.

In FMCG, especially B2C new consumer goods, the founder is the biggest product manager. How to design products that satisfy customers and have high customer experience requires internal re-listing. In terms of time, it takes 2-3 months or even longer to determine a project, but often it may take 3 months for a product to go backwards. In this process, there is great pressure on procurement, materials, packaging design and supply chain. Then why not put the product materials, including stocking and product data in the planning stage? Shorten the product development cycle, so that the product can be better extended to other business scenarios.

Good boy

Good kids have a lot of products, and their boss has a big problem with the selection. It is sometimes the product manager's fault that the products are not easy to sell and slow to sell. R&D is equivalent to the output of the internal database. When planning, we especially thought that if we want to expand to more categories and more tracks in the future, our products and R&D must be more concentrated. From design, materials, finance to planning departments, core teams must be formed around products. Reuse of material basis, including which materials belong to product A and product B, what are the profit points of these materials, and what are the main demand points of customers. This piece is the only thing that bothers him in the internal selection. At this time, we have to meet his needs.

Centric PLM's solution aims to provide enterprises with full-link product digitalization from R&D to supply chain, and help enterprises to quickly capture and respond to the needs of consumers. Centric PLM can shorten product time to market 15%-50%, increase product sales by 5%- 10%, reduce costs by 5%- 15%, and improve management and development efficiency 10%-50%.

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