EWA Systems is currently offering open and free usage of its latest e-commerce technologies as web services. One such web service is EWA Systems' Assortment Analysis Tool. Assortment analysis is a common problem among retailers. Grocery stores are constantly trying to optimize which products get how much space and sits next to which other products. Stores design combinations of just the right combination of items. Manufacturers can optimize the proper product variants in order to cover the needs of the market. TV channels match tv advertisements to tv shows maximizing vieweership, response rates, and later, ad revenue.
While this analysis is fairly straight forward if the assortment's value is simply the addition of its component's values, which assumes that each component's value contribution is independent of the other component's. Unfortunately, this is hardly ever true. In cases where one product may enhance or canabalize the value of another, or where there is fixed amount of product visibility, there is a marked dependance of overal value depending on which component products are included in the assortment.
EWA Systems' Assortment Analysis Tool solves the assortment problem. It realizes the dependencies between products, and therefore efficiently searches for the optimizal combination based on the specified criteria. It is not a sampling solution, but an artificial intelligence proof of the optimial set that maximizes the resulting value or minimizes the resulting costs. EWA Systems' tool is much quicker and accurate than those that rely numerical programming techniques, because it intelligently reduces the possible solution set accelerating the discovery of the answer and enabling its to conquer the presented global optimizatlon problem without getting stuck on local minima or maxima like non-global optization codes are apt to do. Experimentation has shown that EWA System's Assortment Analysis Tool can boost the value of the resulting optimization by over 20% and cut solution time down by more than 10 fold.
EWA Systems' analytical and visualization tools further enhance the Assortment Analysis Tool by quantifying the extent of the dependancies, where and how any value enhancements or canabalization may be occuring, and the robustness of the overall solution to changes in these dependances. The visualization tools allow all of this information to be easily communicated.
For more information or to deploy, contact our Support Team.