Demantra Trade Promotion Management Gives Welch's a Competitive Edge to "Win at the Shelf"

Demantra, a provider of innovative trade promotion management, marketing analytics and supply chain planning solutions, today announced Concord, Mass.-based Welch's, the world's leading marketer of Concord and Niagara grape-based products, has transformed its sales and customer planning process with Demantra Trade Promotion Management (TPM) to enable sales to more effectively and profitably manage their business.

Welch's primary goal for this broad transformation was to enable all corporate functions to effectively and efficiently plan, manage, execute, measure and analyze trade spending and demand. Welch's is executing on this vision with Demantra's help by automating the sales customer planning process and linking sales, marketing, finance, and demand planning functions into an easy-to-use system integrating forecasting, planning, monitoring, and analysis. Welch's sales teams will now spend less time in the office, preparing sales forecasts and managing budgets, and more time in front of the customer selling and building relationships.

"Welch's needed to do what we do faster and smarter," said George Jackman, director of customer marketing at Welch's. "After looking at almost a dozen different vendors, we found that most had a broad solution that did some things well, but only Demantra had the trade management product depth, along with the demand planning and analytics expertise, that we required. We are expecting to experience significant improvements in our trade promotion effectiveness and in efficiencies of our demand planning, production planning, logistics and inventories as a result of the Demantra implementation."

As with most consumer goods companies, the amount Welch's invests in trade promotion is second only to cost of sales. Still, the process of planning, managing and tracking these funds was largely manual, labor-intensive, time consuming and potentially error-prone. Welch's recognized that, to secure a competitive edge, the company needed to improve the management and cross-organizational alignment of its trade promotion process to stay close to its customers and be able to react nimbly to market changes.

"Welch's early success with our TPM solution and the benefits the company expects to achieve are strong proof points of the value Demantra provides to consumer goods companies," remarked Bill Seibel, CEO of Demantra. "As manufacturers face increased competition at the shelf and as compliance regulations put companies under greater scrutiny, a robust TPM solution has moved from a 'nice-to-have' to a 'must have' on most organizations' priority lists. We believe that Demantra's redefinition of TPM is right for consumer goods leaders, in today's marketplace."

Meeting Welch's TPM Requirements

Welch's looked to Demantra TPM, which features promotion analytics and optimization capabilities that integrates trade promotions with demand, sales and marketing planning, to move TPM beyond mere transactional capabilities. Demantra's technology was specifically developed to help manufacturers eliminate the multiple forecasts and plans typically found across sales, marketing, finance and manufacturing that are often done on spreadsheets, not in enterprise systems. With Demantra TPM, manufacturers can achieve one-number planning to place the right product, on the right shelf, at the right time to profitability drive category leadership and "Win at the Shelf."

The Demantra solution implemented at Welch's comprises three primary modules:

--  Event Planner, which automates tasks associated with designing,
    funding, managing, and analyzing promotions;
--  Volume and Fund Planner, which provides a summary of
    customer/geography volume and funding resulting from all SKU volume,
    authorized budgets and planned trade events; and
--  Profit Planner, which provides a summary financial report reflecting
    the annual plan at the selected customer/geography.

The Demantra software enables Welch's to work from a single, integrated trade promotion management, sales, marketing and demand planning solution throughout the organization. When fully implemented in 2005, all departments will have access to the same information, including promotion plans, sales forecasts and figures, trade funds and supply chain data.

The benefits to Welch's of the Demantra solution are many and include:

--  A single data entry point for field and corporate sales users that
    eliminates manual trade promotion processes
--  Improved data integration by linking all relevant systems, sources and
    processes into a common database
--  Accurate tracking of trade promotion dollars
--  Promotion-driven volume forecast incorporated into production volume
    forecast in a timely and accurate fashion
--  Integrated volume and spending data to automate real-time P&L
    visibility at all levels of the corporation

For more information on Demantra TPM, please refer to the press release titled "Demantra Redefines Trade Promotion Management Around Promotion Effectiveness to Empower Consumer Goods Manufacturers to Win at the Shelf" and dated 12/06/04.