Retail assortments have exploded in complexity, yet many pricing departments remain constrained by human bandwidth. This creates a structural bottleneck where even the most sophisticated teams can only manually manage the “Head.” These are the high-velocity, high-visibility products that dominate the weekly spreadsheet. The consequence is a significant failure of capital efficiency. When the “Long Tail,” consisting of the thousands of SKUs that move slower but represent the bulk of your invested capital, is left to languish under static rules, you leave a significant margin on the table.
By leaving 95% of the assortment to chance, organizations effectively ignore their largest profit lever. When a competitor goes out of stock on a niche item and your price remains static, you are essentially giving away margin that the market was already willing to pay. Transitioning to a model that manages the full scale of the catalog is the only way to ensure that slow-moving inventory contributes to net profitability rather than becoming trapped working capital.
