What's New on the Platform — SPS Analytics

In this article, learn about: 

• What's new in the modernized SPS Analytics experience, and why it is more than a visual refresh 

• How standardized retailer data makes cross-account comparisons you can trust 

• Three business questions brands can answer faster, starting with one retailer and one owner 

If you ask a brand what major issues they’ve been having, they rarely say that they don’t have enough retail data.  

Instead, the problem is usually what that data looks like when it arrives. Retailers report on different schedules, using different item numbers and location structures, with fields that seem identical on the surface but measure slightly different things. It’s the brand’s job to locate the files, reconcile the definitions, rebuild a spreadsheet, and decide which version is correct. 

Having retailer data is not the same as having decision-ready insight. Closing that distance is what the modernized SPS Analytics experience is built to do. 

A Shorter Path From Data to Decision 

The new SPS Analytics experience is not a visual refresh. The modernized experience reduces the number of steps between opening SPS Analytics and understanding what is happening across the business. Once the latest retailer data has loaded, dashboards open in seconds once retailer data has loaded. 

From there, the work stays in one place. Filters are applied while you are looking at the data, not configured in advance and rerun. Moving from a high-level result to the retailer, product, region, or location behind it does not require rebuilding a report, and moving between related views does not mean starting over. 

That difference matters most in the work that repeats, such as performance reviews, routine preparatory work, or the second look at an account that seemed soft last week. When each of those takes fewer steps, teams run them more often and see issues sooner. 

The Foundation of Trusted Data 

Before any numbers reach a dashboard, SPS cleans, normalizes, and aligns the sales, inventory, product, and location information coming from each retailer. Standardized mapping connects supplier items and locations to retailer items and locations across trading partners, so a comparison between two accounts is a real comparison rather than an approximation. 

From there, the view bends to the business. Configurable attributes and hierarchies let each brand organize products and locations the way its teams already think about them, whether that is by category, channel, collection, region, or a structure specific to how the company operates. 

NOTE: SPS refreshes daily for retailers that provide daily data and weekly for many others. But store-level visibility is only available when the retailer supplies store-level information, and margin visibility depends on the necessary retailer data or supplier-provided cost information. 

What This Changes Day to Day 

Start where the work already is. A configurable home page puts the KPIs, charts, and favorite dashboards a team checks most often in one place. The recurring weekly review starts assembled instead of rebuilt. 

Investigate without losing your place. Filters are applied in view, and a drilldown moves from retailer to product to region to store without a rerun. Because those filters carry across the session, the train of thought survives the move from one view to the next, which is usually where the useful finding lives. 

See sales and inventory together. On-hand inventory, sell-through, and weeks of supply sit alongside current sales performance. That context is what turns "sales are down" into "sales are down at these accounts, and here is the inventory position behind it."  

Find what deserves attention. Teams can review top and bottom performers, mix shifts, sell-through differences by account or channel, and year over year comparisons where the underlying data supports them. SPS Analytics surfaces where performance is moving and gives teams a way to investigate what may be contributing to it.  

A Customer Example 

Sunday Golf is a small team managing a catalog of roughly 120 SKUs across a growing set of retail relationships. Looking at assortment side by side in SPS Analytics, the team could see how differently two major accounts were carrying the brand. One was stocking 14 items, while the other carried the full catalog across 104 locations. 

Once made visible, that gap is not hard to understand. But the visibility is difficult when each account reports separately and no one has time to line the numbers up by hand. With assortment, sell-through, and weeks of stock in a consistent view, the team can prepare for buyer conversations with account specific evidence and identify where a reorder conversation may be worth exploring without building a report first. 

"It's been a phenomenal tool to make decisions quicker and more efficiently and help grow our relationships with retail customers." 
Galen Brunelle, Co-Founder, Sunday Golf 

Three Decisions To Start With 

A new experience is only worth as much as the decisions it improves. We've compiled a list of questions the new SPS Analytics is helping answer 

Where is performance falling short, and what deserves attention first?  

Revenue and unit performance by retailer, product, region, and SKU makes it possible to investigate underperformance while there is still time to respond, redirect sales attention toward the accounts that matter most, and review product mix with evidence rather than instinct. 

Where might inventory and demand be out of alignment?  

Sales, on-hand inventory, sell-through, and weeks of supply together help teams prioritize which situations to investigate, which retailer conversations to have, and where execution at the shelf deserves a closer look. 

When inventory is constrained, where should the next units go?  

Retailer, region, channel, product, and store-level performance gives allocation discussions a shared starting point and lets teams compare current demand against existing supply priorities. 

Start With a Single Question 

More dashboards is not the goal. A large reporting library that nobody owns tends to go unread, while a small set of trusted views that a team returns to every week can change how a business runs. 

What turns that view into results is the rhythm a team builds around it. It usually looks something like this: 

• A signal shows up in weekly review, whether that is a sell-through number moving in the wrong direction, an account where sales or inventory movement has slowed.  

• Someone adds the context that only your team has, because the data will show what changed but not why.  

• From there the team chooses an action, names the person accountable for it, and comes back the following week to see whether it worked. 

What these steps require is a starting point that everyone trusts and can reach without a week of preparation. 

The SPS Analytics experience shortens the distance between opening a dashboard and knowing what to do next, which makes the rhythm above sustainable rather than aspirational. 

If you are considering where to begin, resist the urge to start everywhere at once. Pick one retailer relationship, one question genuinely worth answering, and one person accountable for the follow up. Get that loop working, then widen it. 

Ready to see the new SPS Analytics experience? Request a demonstration and we'll walk through it with your business in mind.