Category Management: Current Status and Future Outlook

Abstract

This report presents the results and analysis of a survey of 60 leading supermarket retailers and 26 wholesalers concerning the current status and future prospects for category management. Category management is rapidly changing the way supermarket retailers and wholesalers conduct business. In general, retailers are more advanced in implementing category management than wholesalers. Despite much enthusiasm about the concept and the tremendous trade journal coverage over the past few years, very few retailers and fewer wholesalers were actually fully operational with category management in mid-1994. This report shows that both retailers and wholesalers face formidable constraints which are impeding more rapid integration of category management. The most common constraint is technology, both hardware and software. The technological predicament for most companies is one of having too much data and too little information in easily accessible forms and the lack of trained personnel to interpret scanner and other data.