How category teams can create The Ever-Perfect Shelf

When shelf strategy, execution, and measurement are disconnected, even the best category work breaks down. Ensure continuous on-shelf excellence with an integrated approach. 

Creating a data-informed shelf strategy is one thing. Ensuring it continually delivers results in the field is another. Category managers and other space planning professionals tend to be detail-oriented by nature, balancing retailer needs with space constraints, and striving for performance optimization. Which is why watching plans unravel at the shelf – or lacking the visibility to prove what delivered the desired impact – can be so challenging. 

Fragmentation slows progress on AI innovation, which requires a highly structured, trusted data foundation to work at scale.

The leading retail data and vertical AI company, Crisp, takes an integrated approach that connects planning, execution, and measurement into a continuous system. Our four product pillars empower category teams to take greater ownership of their business – from planning to store-level execution – enabling them not only to create, but activate and automate, their vision of The Ever-Perfect Shelf.

Meet Crisp at the Category Management Association (CMA) Conference to learn how a single, integrated platform supports the future of category management for an ever-perfect shelf. Meet our team at Booth #219!

The self-improving category feedback loop

Crisp’s vertical approach to Retail AI begins with the data foundation, integrating and harmonizing data across retailers and distributors, with AI Master Data enabling custom alignment and enrichment of product data to an organization’s internal classification. This is a critical first step to achieving real-time shelf visibility, which AI Agents can also leverage to monitor live supply chain health and surface strategic recommendations.

Whereas planogram and assortment changes used to be made infrequently, today’s categories are more dynamic, and suppliers who can stay ahead of revisions, compliance, and in-store execution are trusted with greater influence at the shelf.

The concept of The Ever-Perfect Shelf involves streamlining these historically disconnected functions, seamlessly, with a trusted, end-to-end technology partner. The goal is to create a continuous feedback loop where shelf decisions are executed, measured, and improved in near real-time.

4 pillars of The Ever-Perfect Shelf

The path to achieving flawless retail execution – and planning for the quickly evolving future of retail categories – is comprised of the following data-driven solutions:

1. Organize and enrich product data with AI Master Data

Automation magnifies whatever data it is given. If attribution is inaccurate, automation simply executes flawed logic faster. AI Master Data establishes the foundation for accurate performance analytics and store execution by enabling teams to quickly align product data with category-specific structures and hierarchies. The intuitive, easy-to-navigate solution also allows teams to add their own levels of enrichment, helping them stay ahead of trends such as flavor profiles or ingredients.

Core AI Master Data capabilities include:

• Harmonizes and enriches product attributes across retailers and distributors
• Aligns external retail data to internal category and assortment structures
• Ensures automation accurately connects the right product data points

2. Space Management to execute planograms at scale

Planograms may be thoughtfully designed, but execution can break down due to manual workflows spanning thousands of store-specific planograms. Crisp’s Space Management capabilities including MissionControl focus on automating planogram creation and orchestrating execution – ensuring dynamic changes are deployed quickly, consistently, and at scale.

Category teams spend less time managing files and more time improving the shelf. For example, Danone, an industry leader and multinational partner, who leverages Crisp planogram automation across 23 categories to achieve:

• 50% increase in planogram efficiency
• 2x more planograms executed

“Intelligent space management with solutions like Crisp helps us respond to the real-time trends shaping the market today, and it also gives us the context we need to conceptualize and plan the aisle of tomorrow.”

^{Dale Clark, Head of Global Category Management, The Hershey’s Company}

3. Real-time Shelf Intelligence for understanding and optimizing retail performance

Even when shelf and assortment decisions are executed, many category teams lack clear proof that those changes delivered results. Real-Time Shelf Analytics closes this gap by measuring what happens after execution — providing shelf-level visibility into availability, space productivity, and compliance across stores, retailers, and regions.

Crisp Shelf Intelligence ingests, normalizes, and harmonizes planogram (POG), point-of-sale (POS), and inventory data to deliver interactive dashboards that connect sales, space, and inventory metrics. 

Core Shelf Intelligence capabilities include:

• Measures availability, space productivity, and execution consistency
• Delivers shelf-level insight at store, retailer, and national levels
• Identifies compliance issues and performance gaps before sales decline

Shelf Intelligence helps teams optimize on-shelf availability (OSA) and grow shelf share with dependable daily insights.

“Having data is just the starting point. Real value comes from turning it into insights and action. Crisp helps us do that faster and more efficiently – simplifying our retail data analysis, and leading to stronger recommendations and consistent value for our retail partners.”

^{Rachael Peot, Senior Director, Category Strategy & Analytics, Schwan’s Company}

4. AI Agents automate tasks and proactively solve supply chain misalignment

Even with clean data and strong execution, shelf conditions change quickly and often faster than teams can manually monitor or respond. AI Agents solve this by continuously analyzing real-time retail signals and surfacing strategic recommendations. The technology is built on Crisp’s semantic layer for the retail industry technology, which crucially ensures the accuracy of insights and maps outputs to core retail business functions. AI Agents additionally offer explanations and root cause analyses to solve problems faster, with greater confidence. 

Crisp AI Agents enable rapid deployment to close the loop on category management strategy, managing tasks that include:

• Automated Monday Morning recaps
• Sales decomposition analysis
• Out-of-stock root cause analysis
• Promotional optimization

“Our retailer partners seek granular, store-level collaboration. AI can speed up this process, but only if the right real-time data and foundation are in place. Partners like Crisp help us achieve hyper-localization at scale, by securing the clean and structured data necessary to act.”

^{Dave Nolen, VP of Category Leadership and Shopper Insights, Kraft-Heinz}

Meet Crisp at the Category Management Association (CMA) Conference to learn how a single, integrated platform supports the future of category management for an ever-perfect shelf. Meet our team at Booth #219! Ready to learn more? Speak with an expert.