Our client was looking to better understand how leading U.S. retailers structure their merchandising, planning, site merchandising, and vendor partnership models, as well as the productivity levels and automation maturity supporting those teams.
The objective was to establish clear productivity and organizational benchmarks across U.S. retail merchandising functions, covering buyer scope, planner ratios, automation levels, and site-merchandising and marketing structures, to help the client assess how peer organizations operate and identify improvement opportunities in tooling, resourcing, and cross-functional collaboration.
10EQS conducted in-depth interviews with senior merchandising, ecommerce, operations, and category leaders across the targeted competitor set, enabling candid insight into operating models, automation maturity, and decision rights across merchandising and marketingteams.
10EQS identified KPIs across 20+ target metrics such as number of vendors buyers manage, numbers of SKUs, amount of time spent on planogramming activities, organization and structure of site merchants and performance marketing teams. 10EQS found that automation remains limited and rule-based, with wide variation in planogramming involvement. Teams are largely organized by category and channel, giving the client a strong fact base to reassess operating models and automation priorities.