Catalogue fit

For a manufacturer or distributor, the product lines a customer buys against the lines customers of the same type and size buy from you. The gap, valued, is the cross-sell list.

DefinitionFor a manufacturer or distributor, the product lines a customer buys against the lines customers of the same type and size buy from you. The gap, valued, is the cross-sell list.

How it is computed

Fit = lines bought ÷ lines in the norm for the customer's band

Measured at the product line the sales team sells, never at part-number level. The norm comes from the firm's own customers.

Channels

Direct and distributor sales are a dimension of every row, reconciled separately, so a shipment is never counted at the distributor and again at the end customer.

How it is computed

Product families the customer buys divided by the families relevant to customers of its application or type, where relevant means bought by more than half of comparable customers.

Example

A packaging plant buys bearings and belts. Comparable plants also buy seals, lubricants and sensors from the manufacturer. Fit is two of five, and the three missing families are worth about $38,000 a year at the median.

Where it goes wrong

Every family in the catalogue treated as relevant to every customer. The gap list fills with products the customer has no use for.

Articles that use this term

Wallet share and penetration · Industrial manufacturers

Aftermarket attach: installed base against parts and service revenue

How an industrial manufacturer measures aftermarket capture per customer from the installed base register and the parts and service ledger: expected annual aftermarket per unit from the customers who buy it all from the OEM, actual per customer, the attach rate, and the list of customers running the OEM's equipment on someone else's parts, ranked by the revenue at norm.

16 Sept 20262 min read Wallet share and penetration · Industrial manufacturers

Catalogue fit per customer: how a manufacturer measures the product lines its customers could buy

A method for industrial and component manufacturers to measure, per customer, the product lines bought against the lines customers of that type buy, value the gap, keep direct and distributor channels from double counting, and reconcile to shipped revenue.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation · Industrial manufacturers

Direct and distributor channels without double counting: the manufacturer's reconciliation

How a manufacturer that sells direct and through distributors builds one roll-up where the same shipment is never counted twice: channel as a dimension, separate reconciliation per channel, point-of-sale data where it exists, and the assertion that channels sum to shipped revenue.

16 Sept 20263 min read How-to guides

How to define the norm from your own customer base: the denominator behind every gap

Every penetration, fit, share or whitespace figure needs a denominator: what a customer like this one usually buys. This guide sets out how to build that norm from your own customers by banding them on type and size, the majority rule, the minimum band size, and how to record overrides so the gap list stays credible.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Product taxonomy for analytics: lines, families and SKUs, and which level each measure uses

Why a product list with four hundred SKUs produces whitespace everywhere and a concentration figure that means nothing, the three levels a product taxonomy needs, line, family and SKU, which measure is computed at which level, the rule that a SKU belongs to exactly one family and a family to exactly one line, the dated mapping that survives a range change, and the identity that revenue sums identically at every product level.

16 Sept 20263 min read Forecast and pipeline · Industrial manufacturers

Quote-to-order conversion per customer: the quotes that go nowhere, and why

How an industrial manufacturer measures the share of quotes that become orders per customer, per product family and per estimator, from the quote log and the order book: conversion by count and by value, the customers who request many quotes and place few orders, the product families where the price is losing, the lead time on quotes that convert against those that do not, and the identity that ties converted quotes to booked orders.

16 Sept 20263 min read