Q&A: Anis Hadj-Taieb, General Manager DemandTec: Exhibiting at RTS
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I recently joined DemandTec in November of 2021. Over the past twenty years, I’ve worked in various parts of the retail industry, with extensive experience leading sales teams focused on pricing optimization solutions for retail and FMCG organizations.
I’ve held executive level roles at GreyOrange, Revionics, and Eversight, as well as PRGX, Infor Global and Oracle. Before corporate life, I earned a master’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in France.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
DemandTec is a pioneering leader in retail pricing technology and was founded in 1999. The company is ushering in the new era of unified autonomous commerce. With Unify by DemandTec™ — the industry’s first unified autonomous lifecycle pricing and collaboration suite— retailers can unite their data, systems, internal teams, and collaborate with suppliers to generate profitable revenue growth with the power of AI.
From food to fashion, DemandTec partners with more than 700 retailers and their suppliers around the globe, such as Acosta, Carrefour, Cencosud, Coop, Exito, Farmacias Cruz Azul, The Very Group, Tops Friendly Markets, and W.H. Smith, and many others.
Recently, DemandTec has named to the Constellation Research Price Optimization Short List for 2021 and 2022; 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Retail Unified Price, Promotion, and Markdown Applications; and ranked as a top 10 software vendor in 21 categories in the 2021 RIS Software Leaderboard.
What’s special about the service and your approach? What are you showing retailers at the show?
At RTS, we will launch our new DemandTec Autonomous Pricing On Demand service for FMCG retailers. The new service delivers enterprise-grade, AI-powered price optimization for retailers of all sizes to quickly respond to market changes so they can compete in a challenging competitive environment with pressures from all channels, inflation, and rapidly changing consumer behaviors. A first for the retail pricing technology market, the service eliminates cost, training, and resource barriers of traditional pricing solutions, while improving price perception and market position to grow revenue up to 3% and margins up to 5%.
What advantage does it add?
Retailers – both large and small – can get the key benefits of the DemandTec Autonomous Pricing application with our new Autonomous Pricing On Demand service that offers:
- AI-powered price optimization to apply intelligent pricing across zones and categories – down to the item level for each location (if desired)- enabling retailers to quickly respond to consumer demand and market changes, at scale
- Weekly price optimization recommendations – based on retailer strategy and data feeds driving highly accurate consumer demand forecasts and competitive insights
- Dedicated pricing team discusses recommendations and performance, with value-added consulting to discover and share insights including anonymized collective insights across volumes of historical shopping data
- Rapid time-to-value in just 4-6 weeks with Quick Start implementation and Pricing Strategy Health Check diagnostic
- Minimal commitment with annual subscription-based pricing that enables retailers of all sizes access to enterprise-grade price optimization. And it’s simple to use with no need for training, change management, or hefty IT resources
How does a product/service implementation look like and how do you measure success?
A dedicated team of DemandTec pricing experts work with the retailer’s decision makers to understand their business objectives, product and category goals, and pricing rules. These retailer specific conditions are then configured and implemented to create everyday price recommendations with a full complement of diagnostics and consumer demand insights. Retailers are then able to review and approve the prices for each location or across all locations. A robust set of measures or key performance indicators (KPIs) are forecasted. Success is achieved as these KPIs are realized.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Retailers using Autonomous Price On Demand will receive price recommendations that appeal to the consumers of each location. These highly tuned everyday prices recognize consumer behaviours, price sensitivity and competitive influence on consumers. For example, if a retailer desired to maximise growth while maintaining profit margin, the AI-powered price recommendations will provide the optimal prices across items, categories, and zones, for store to achieve the desired results.
A case study for our DemandTec Autonomous Pricing application can be found here, https://www.demandtec.com/resources/video-case-study-conad-nord-pricing/
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for the rest of 2022 and into 2023 / What challenges are retailers facing right now to prepare better?
The challenges facing UK retailers as the country adjusts to the new normal of post-Covid are mounting. Labour shortages, inventory availability, inflation, and hyper-competition as well as pressures from suppliers are all bearing down on retailers. This will likely persist through 2022 and for the next two to three years. Retail has never witnessed all these pressures simultaneously.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
DemandTec is uniquely positioned to support retailers who are facing so many pressures across their business. The key capability we deliver is a comprehensive whole store view of consumer demand. Detailed insights for every item across consumers (individuals and clusters) are addresses by our AI-powered solutions that deliver specific recommendations for price, promotions, markdowns, and collaboration with trading partners. With our solutions, retailers can set prices that motivate positive consumer responses that maximize the achievement of the business objectives of revenue, profit, and volume.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
As we launch DemandTec Autonomous Price On Demand, we see a whole swath of retailers who may have previously thought such powerful technology was only available to the largest competitors. We are levelling the field of play and offering these powerful solutions to retailers of all sizes. Early feedback from retailers is quite positive. We see this as a terrific opportunity to support a set of retailers who would be well served by AI-powered pricing capabilities to meet the challenges of the market.
Any final thoughts?
Autonomous Price On Demand speaks to the barriers many have perceived when taking on price optimization. Our ability to now address retailers of all sizes speaks to the power of AI, the efficiencies of cloud computing with access to our pricing experts that act as an extension of retail merchandising teams. The advantages of the largest retailers are now available to the rest of the retail market.
What would you like to say to retailers visiting the show?
Stop by booth 6C88 to meet the new DemandTec and learn more about DemandTec Autonomous Price On Demand!
For more about DemandTec and Anis Hadj-Taieb
DemandTec by Acoustic. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with offices in London, Boston, San Francisco, and more
https://www.linkedin.com/company/demandtec-inc.
