On a daily basis, brand managers are confronted with a variety of high-impact decisions that must be made as quickly as possible in response to a variety of problems including fraud, out-of-stocks, ad misprints, promoter scheduling crises, and customer service issues.

At the same time, dwindling margins have resulted in the reallocation or reduction of labor. Managers cannot possibly respond to everything, so priorities must be established.ver the last couple of years, a variety of systems and technologies—such as human resource, point of sale, and inventory control systems—have become available to help them set priorities and make tough decisions.for executives to use in decision making.

Unfortunately, they now rely on multiple systems that often operate on a standalone basis.Information is abundant but resides in disparate silos—making it difficult for employees to access and share as well as For example, marketing managers, merchants, and operations managers in a given Organization are often making decisions based solely on their individual roles—and the limited information available to them—and may not necessarily be acting collaboratively. In the worst cases, one manager may be working from information that conflicts with that presented to another manager, such as a report that has not been updated to reflect the

most recent transactions. This can lead to individual functional areas of the company acting independently of one another, and possibly even in direct conflict with each other.

What still remains elusive in the retail industry today is the ability to integrate—both technically and functionally. By integrating their technologies and processes, retailers can optimize their most valuable resources—the time and efforts of their employees across all functional business areas. A major step in this direction is for retailers to provide the right people with the right information—structured in such a way that they can easily see when there is a need to take action.

Pulsesuite is a step in this direction. As a tool, the Pulsesuite provides both breadth and depth of information for the marketers to gauge and benchmark their product category with that of related categories, as well as raise awareness of growing trends. Information provided enables brands to determine product, target market, and regional opportunities and allows them to set their marketing plans accordingly. These quality tools equip brand managers with market driven, empirical data-based insights.