Acosta Sales & Marketing Teams with IRI to Bring Best-in-Class Space Management and Planogramming to Retailers

Business Wire, May 7, 2008

IRI Apollo Designer Workstation to Improve Shelf Assortment and Space Planning at Cluster and Store-Specific Levels for Retailers

CHICAGO -- Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), the leading global provider of consumer, shopper, and market insights for consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, and healthcare industries, today announced that the Acosta Sales & Marketing Company, one of North America's largest providers of in-house planogram support solutions to the CPG industry, is the latest client to begin utilizing IRI's retail space planning solution, Apollo Designer Workstation([TM]) and will be collaborating with IRI to implement the solution at select retail customers. The announcement was made during The FMI Show taking place on May 4-7 in Las Vegas.

"Retailers are demanding optimized planograms and synchronized product assortments at the store and cluster level," says Jim Hanson, vice president, space technology services, Acosta Sales & Marketing Company. "IRI Apollo Designer Workstation will enable us to address this growing demand and reduce the implementation time for our retail customers."

Designer Workstation is an easy-to-use, desktop-based, Web-enabled solution that leverages rules-based automation to revolutionize the retail space planning process. It combines assortment, capacity and merchandising rules to generate hundreds of unique planograms per planner per day.

"We couldn't be more thrilled about forging this 'first-of-its-kind' relationship with Acosta," said President of IRI Global Retail Tom Peterson. "Together, we're implementing Apollo with a select group of the nation's top retailers to dramatically increase the 'speed-to-benefit' retailers receive from automated planogram optimization."

Designer Workstation is a component of the widely used Apollo system, the de-facto standard within the CPG and retail industries, and can be used with other space planning programs as well. Additional detail on the product can be found at: us.infores.com/page/manufacturers/retail_execution/apollo_design_work.

About Acosta Sales and Marketing Company

Acosta Sales and Marketing Company is a leading full-service sales and marketing agency in North America, providing outsourced sales, merchandising, marketing and promotional services to manufacturers in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla. Acosta has more than 12,000 associates and operations throughout the U.S. and Canada. For more information, visit www.acosta.com.

About IRI

IRI is the world's leading provider of consumer, shopper, and retail market intelligence and insights supporting 95 percent of the FORTUNE Global 500 consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail and healthcare companies. Only IRI offers the unique combination of integrated market information, automated and predictive analytics, innovative enabling technologies, and domain expertise. With IRI, leading retailers and manufacturers are able to quickly discover breakthrough insights driving smarter decisions and actions across the enterprise for breakthrough results. Companies around the world depend on IRI for improved productivity, stronger brands, and dramatic revenue growth. For more information, visit http://us.infores.com.