Contact:
IRI Continues to Expand Channel Coverage, Adding
Vending Sales Through Relationship with MSA
IRI and MSA Form Relationship to Expand Marketplace Visibility for
Confections and Snacks Manufacturers in Vending Arena
CHICAGO and PITTSBURGH, PA – October 13, 2004 – Confections and snack
manufacturers will finally be able to track sales of their products
through vending machines using a new service to be delivered by
Information Resources, Inc. (IRI). IRI and Management Science
Associates, Inc. (MSA) today announced a strategic relationship that
will provide confections and snacks manufacturers with new and
previously unavailable visibility into confections and snacks sales
and highly-accurate projected channel trends in the vending arena.
Under the relationship, IRI will bundle MSA’s ProVen™ dataset, the
first syndicated nationally projected vend sales data, with IRI’s
InfoScan® Food, Drug, Mass and Convenience Store data to provide a
significantly expanded view of the vending marketplace and new
competitive insights to drive increased growth and profitability.
The combination of MSA’s ProVen with IRI’s InfoScan data will offer
manufacturers a deeper understanding of category share and competitive
trends by geographic region and machine location for benchmarking
purposes. The national and regional sales data will be available
through IRI’s InfoScan toolset and seamlessly integrated with the other
IRI channels, creating an easy-to-access, unified view of the
manufacturer’s business.
"MSA has provided premier analytics including sophisticated custom
projection methodologies and forecasting solutions to leading CPG
companies for nearly a halfcentury and we are pleased to be partnering
with them," said Scott W. Klein, President and CEO, IRI. "Over the past
12 months, IRI has made significant strides in increasing coverage for
its clients, creating new innovative relationships with several leading
retailers to offer unique insights. Our relationship with MSA extends
that effort, leveraging IRI's core capability in providing data
integration solutions and MSA’s unique vending data stream to fill
another important coverage gap for confections and snacks
manufacturers. These new capabilities offer tremendous benefit to the
CPG industry and enable IRI to provide entirely new visibility that
can represent as much as 15% of sales for major confections and
snacks manufacturers."
Supporting IRI’s ongoing initiatives to increase the value and relevance
of marketplace information in key industry verticals such as confections
and snacks, the vending channel insights provide a host of new
capabilities, enabling manufacturers to:
- Understand the dynamics and competitive set in the vending channel
- Develop insight on what drives growth trends
- More effectively test the impact of distribution and assortment
changes on competitors and category sales
- Make fact-based channel development investments
- Implement more effective demand planning
Dr. Alfred Kuehn, Founder and CEO of MSA stated "We are excited to join
with IRI on this offering. IRI is the known leading provider of
syndicated marketplace information to the confections and snack
foods industries across the traditional retail channels. MSA is the
only organization that has succeeded in creating an accurate, projected
information source to fill the void in the Vending channel. Aligning
ProVen with IRI's brand and geography hierarchies will allow companies
to effortlessly measure and understand greater marketplace coverage; a
common goal across all packaged goods organizations."
MSA will continue to process and offer VendScape® machine level data,
its data engine and a critical input to the ProVen solution, under the
VendScape brand. For more information on this integrated solution from
IRI and MSA, please visit www.allaboutvending.com.
ABOUT MSA
Since its incorporation in 1963, Management Science Associates, Inc.
(MSA) has established itself as the foremost developer and supplier of
effective data solutions to manufacturers and distributors within the
various CPG trade channels, including the vend channel. MSA’s core
business competencies are the analysis of consumer buying behavior,
business analysis, knowledgeware products, media, and information
management solutions. MSA provides marketing solutions for 300 clients,
including some of the largest U.S. and foreign corporations and
institutions. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, MSA has offices in New York;
Chicago; Atlanta; High Point, NC; United Kingdom; and Malaysia. More
information is available at www.msa.com.
ABOUT INFORMATION RESOURCES, INC.
Information Resources, Inc. is the leading global provider of market
content, analytic services and Business Performance Management (BPM)
solutions to the CPG, retail and healthcare industries. IRI's clients
include many of the leading CPG, retail, and healthcare companies in
the world. IRI's market content and analytic services provide these
companies with market and consumer insights. IRI's BPM solutions
uniquely combine its breakthrough enterprise analytics software,
market content and analytic models to provide a total view of the
market and to enable maximum business performance across marketing,
sales and operations. IRI's solutions enable the consumer-driven
real-time CPG and retail enterprise. More information is available at
www.infores.com.
ABOUT VENDSCAPE®
MSA and Validata Computer and Research Corp. of Montgomery AL have jointly
developed the VendScape® service utilizing machine-item information
exported from Validata’s RouteSail Millennium Software. The sample
consists of over 50,000 vending machines and tracks item-level detail
for confections, snacks and beverages. VendScape® reports dollar and
unit sales to product manufacturers and vend operators and includes
operational measures such as over or short, and sales measures such
as distribution and turns.
