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CHICAGO - ACNielsen began providing Internet-accessed category management templates in 1995 with a tool now called NetDispatch, according to Seth Freeman, director of product management for ACNielsen's decision support group.
Users select the unique products, markets, facts and time periods critical to their decision-making. Rather than a category manager or vendor partner spending hours going through raw data to assemble the reports and scorecards that are needed to support the category management process, NetDispatch automatically places selected information in syndicated and/or custom templates that users can quickly download from the Internet and analyze to identify opportunities in product assortment, pricing and promotion. Templates are updated every time the databases are updated-in most cases every two to four weeks.
The NetDispatch reports are downloaded into Microsoft Office applications to make it easy for users to build on them. To date, clients are using NetDispatch to generate over 250,000 reports a month.
ACNielsen also offers another category management information tool called NITRO (the ACNielsen Interfact to Microsoft Office), an...