Twenty-seven percent of manufacturers report spending three to five days a month consolidating data to support category management insights, with a further 26 percent spending a full five days on the task.
That’s according to the third global Category Management Survey from Symphony GOLD, a provider of a unified software platform for omnichannel retail. In the U.S., data consolidation takes notably longer: 31 percent say three to five days; 38 percent report it taking five days.
The survey also found that the demand for increased granularity is increasing while the lead times for performing major and minor assortment reviews are shortening. Sixty-one percent of manufacturers globally reported on average a three-month lead time for major reviews and one month for minor ones.
Moreover, demands from internal teams for analysis is growing with manufacturer organizations, reducing the time available to serve retail partners. When asked how serving internal teams affected their availability to work on analysis and recommendations for retail partners, 57 percent of respondents said that they now felt a noticeable or significant impact on their availability.
Symphony GOLD said the lengthier time in certain regions for data collection could be due to an increasing amount of data sources being reviewed in order to understand and predict customer behavior.
The survey polled over 250 leading CPG manufacturers from across the U.S. and Europe.
Overall, the survey found strong disagreement among trading partners on assortment priorities. Retailers are focused on category innovation through new product development, rationalization, and planogram design in their assortment reviews. CPG manufacturers are keen to drive revenue by increasing distribution and listing opportunities with products that already exist.