DemandTec Retail Challenge - DemandTec

Grant Name: DemandTec Retail Challenge

Funding Organization: DemandTec

Grant Cycle: October 7

Contact: Christine Murad-Haroun

Phone: 650.645.7163. fax: 650.645.7400

Address: DemandTec, Inc.
1 Franklin Parkway, Building 910
San Mateo, CA 94403

Website: http://demandtecretailchallenge.com/about/index.php

Email: Christine.Murad@demandtec.com

Eligibility: This contest is open exclusively to registered seniors at your high school who plan on continuing their education at a college, university, technical school or other institution of higher learning. Students should have minimally taken Algebra II, with an introduction to statistical concepts. Immediate family members of DemandTec and Sponsor employees/family members are not eligible to participate.

Background: The DemandTec Retail Challenge Originated In 2005 As A Local Competition In The San Francisco Bay Area And Has Now Expanded To Many Regions Nationally. Its Goal Is To Present Math, Science And Business Concepts Creatively Through An Online Simulation Giving Students A Taste Of How Retailers And Consumer Products Manufacturers Make Pricing And Inventory Decisions.

Students Compete To Win A Monetary Scholarship To Help Further Their Education And For A Chance To Partake In The Grand Championships At NASDAQ In New York City.

Other Important Information:

Regional Contest: October/November

Beginning in the Regional round, the top three teams from each region with the highest profit present the details of their analysis to a panel of judges. The judges will determine the Regional winning team, whose members will be awarded a monetary scholarship to assist with furthering their education.

Semifinals: December

Each Regional winning team is invited to compete in the Semifinals round, consisting of a one-day, time-intensive contest where the top five teams with the highest profits advance to the Grand Championships at NASDAQ in New York City.

Grand Championship: January

The top five Grand Championship teams are funded to travel to New York City and participate in the Grand Championship round at NASDAQ, again analyzing a typical retail problem and presenting their findings to a panel of judges representing the field of Retail and Consumer Products analytics.

DemandTec's Retail Challenge has three stages, each designed to demonstrate the utility of math and science education to high school students as they work with real-world retail situations. In the first stage, the regional round, 2-person student teams step into the shoes of pricing analysts at a major retailer, choosing prices and basic promotional activity on a week-by-week basis to optimize the retailer's profit from those products. The most successful students use modeling techniques, including regression and affinity analyses to achieve the highest profit. At the conclusion of the pricing simulation, participants present their results and strategies to a team of industry expert judges, who evaluate the teams' profit numbers and analytical techniques to select participants in the semi-final round.

In the semi-final round, the teams face a new problem: optimizing advertising choices and layouts. For this challenge, teams must determine which products are most suitable for advertisement in a weekly circular and choose a layout for the promoted items. Using a tool based on DemandTec's Promotion Planning and Management service, the students use their optimized choices to create a layout for the circular, along with an explanation of analytical techniques used to choose the advertising strategy. Successful teams will be able to forecast predicted advertising returns and use inter-product relationships to maximize projected advertising effectiveness.

In the Grand Championship round, winners from the semi-final round fly to New York City and compete at the heart of the NASDAQ stock exchange in Times Square. During this round, students use DemandTec's Shopper Insights solution to create enterprise-level strategy, choosing promotional tactics across multiple product categories. Over the course of several hours, students model the behavior of the selected categories, choose promotional strategies on a product-by-product basis, and present their findings to an executive board comprised of top industry executives, including Retail Challenge partners. Examining the analyses, results, and presentations of each team, these executives select the Retail Challenge Grand Champions, who ring the closing bell at NASDAQ and collect the grand prize scholarship award.

Interaction with Other Teams

To increase the realism and excitement of the competition, each team’s prices influence the “market price” for the region and thus the resulting consumer demand. Teams have the option of purchasing the average market price for their products each week in order to incorporate that information into their analysis.

Daily Feedback and Final Submissions

The Retail Challenge runs within each region over the course of 2 weeks/10 business days. During the duration of the contest, students must submit their current pricing and inventory for each product by the end of each day, and their cumulative submissions are assessed, giving them a sense of how they are doing relative to other teams. At the end of the contest timeframe, each team’s final pricing and purchase decisions are evaluated, and the three teams with the highest profits advance to their Regional Final.