Determination of your sophistication level allows you to use optimization in the most effective way to meet your particular needs.

Impact to your profitability. To be smart and make good decisions, you need to understand available data. This can be limited and very expensive. You probably don’t have the POS data which includes all of your promotional data (TPRs, features, displays and ads) for every one of your retailers. You should have the historical shipment data. But without POS data, you cannot accurately track trends and predict outcomes.

Let’s do an exercise called “Rate my Data” to determine whether your modeling is accurate

If your rating is Good – is that good enough for you? The more causal factors you have in your model (price points, store locations, execution percentage, demographics…), the more accurate your predictions will be. Without POS data, you can still determine your base volume forecast but it will be difficult to align the incremental volume using shipment data only.