Category Management Software

Editors Note: This Category Management Software is the Space Planning Software market leader which came from obscurity to dominance due to being the first windows based software on the market. Spaceman's windows product was pretty bad at that time - 7 years ago. I would welcome current user opinions about on the discussion forum.

Information Resources Inc : Apollo

Editors Note: This is a worldwide company and is listed on the NASDAQ (IRIC). HQ is in Chicago, 150 North Clinton Street, Chicago, Illinois 60661.

There site has some useful statistics as well - like,

Some recent studies have raised further Industry concerns such as:

Manufacturers spend 1% of sales on retail execution - 50% is wasted! (NEO Study, 1998)

Out of stocks exceed 8% of category sales on average. This costs retailers .5% of customer base each year. (Coca Cola Research Council)

Within 6 months of shelf reset, 30% of stores suffer planogram erosion. (IRI study)

In Asia Pacific the company has offices in Sydney, the Regional Headquarters, Melbourne, Brisbane, Taipei, Hong Kong and an Apollo distributor in Auckland. Therefore, it seems like it does quite well in the Asia Pacific Region.

Its Regional HQ is also based in Melbourne and if you like your food, the city has loads of great restaurants - reason enough to buy the software as you may be able to get a business trip out of it!

This company looks as if it has interesting Category Management Software. Apart from space planning software, it has many other products in its range such as POS software. Also, the following software has a simulation feature which, although I have never seen it is a very interesting concept. Anyway, the following is some information taken from their web site.

SpaceMaker™ is a no-nonsense tool for fast and efficient Space Management throughout the organisation. It is not packed with cumbersome features, nor are our customers required to purchase one module after another. It is a robust and streamlined program, which merchandising professionals can utilise in the field and at the company's headquarters to increase sales, avoid out-of-stock situations, decrease the amount of inventory, and improve the overall efficiency of their retail operation.

The Advantages:

fastest Space Management software to date
easy to learn and use
most affordable Space Management software available
only all-in-one tool for Space and Category Management
Ithas many practical features designed to make your work faster and more efficient. With the software, you can easily create planograms and floor plans, visualise and simulate different options, customise and print out the essential reports, receive instant feedback on product and group performance, or import and export data and images in all industry formats. Only SpaceMaker™ has SmartIndex(tm) features, which enables integrating Category Management guidelines with store-specific customer data, thus optimising product group performance.

SpaceMaker™ main features include:
planograms
reporting
floor plans
simulations
SmartIndex(tm)
SpaceMaker™ is compatible with following databases

Microsoft Access
dBaseIII
dBaseIV
Paradox
Foxpro
Spaceman
SpaceMaker™ System Minimum Requirements

Pentium PC
64 Mb RAM
20 Mb available disc space
Windows 95 / 98, Windows NT / 2000