The purpose of this article is to discuss the free resources that DotActiv has made available to help anyone interested in category management as a topic. This includes anyone who is still studying towards a retail-related degree.
At DotActiv, we believe in empowering the public with in-depth and practical retail knowledge.
We have always maintained that we want to be part of the drive to educate the retail industry and show that category management is not as complex as it is perceived.
To help us fulfill this goal, we decided to offer a range of free resources that will give you valuable insights into category management related topics.
DotActiv Academy
The DotActiv Academy is our online training platform that allows you to learn all about the theory behind the category management process. Our courses also cover software training to equip you to implement category management best practices using DotActiv’s specialised software.
DotActivs’ Academy consists of six Software Mastery Levels; each focusing on a different aspect of category management. That includes Data, Clusters, Assortment Planning, Planogram Generation, Macro (Floor) Space Planning, and Reporting.
You can also join debates, post questions, and connect with like-minded professionals because the DotActiv Academy is a social category management community with learning at its core.
The best part is that there is no cost to access all of this information. You can register your profile and get started immediately.
To learn more about the DotActiv Academy, you can read this article.
Visit here to register for free.
DotActiv PowerBase
Knowledge is power. This is why we launched our PowerBase, DotActiv’s official category management knowledgebase.
We designed it as a platform that allows our users (and anyone interested in learning how to use the DotActiv software) to have instant answers to all of their software-related questions.
All articles have been categorised so that they are easy to access. You can also type your search term into the search bar to find an article that matches your search. This provides you with the exact steps to achieve what you have searched for.
If you find an article that appears to give you the answer, but upon reading it, only partially answers your question, you can provide us with your feedback. In fact, we really encourage our users to ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ our articles.
We appreciate and encourage any feedback because it allows us to provide our readers with in-depth answers that cover all aspects of a feature of our software. If you felt an article was either helpful or unhelpful, you can find the comment box at the end of the article.
If you are using the DotActiv application or Activ8, you can access it through the software. You can read how to do that in this article.
Free Downloadable Ebooks and Resources
We have a collection of free ebooks and other resources that you can download to improve your understanding of retail and category management.
On our website, there is a Resources section – found here – which houses a variety of ebooks, case studies, and free templates and tools.
Ebooks
We have a variety of ebooks that cover key aspects of category management as well as other aspects of the retail industry.
Ebooks cover topics such as
- Merchandising;
- POS Data;
- Retail Analytics;
- Floor Planning;
- Field Marketing;
- Planograms;
- Assortment Planning; and
- Clustering.
While we plan on publishing more ebooks in the future, we have also recently introduced a new way of producing ebooks.
When developing ebooks, we have (and will continue to) consult multiple internal experts with a combined category management experience of more than 35 years. In an effort to be transparent, we list the experts that we consulted with to create the ebook. From there, we also balance our retail knowledge and perspectives with third-party research from a globally trusted source.
We also treat each ebook as an academic resource for retail professionals so you can expect in-text citations and a comprehensive bibliography.
Case Studies
Through the resources page, you can also read about any recently published case studies. In the case studies, we take you through the challenges faced by retailers or suppliers and unpack how DotActiv delivered a service or software solution to help them overcome these challenges.
We also provide you with the financial and practical results so you can see how we helped our clients.
We also plan on publishing more case studies in the future.
Free Templates and Tools
There are also free templates and tools available in the Resources section of our website.
While you can get access to DotActiv Free and a 14-day free trial of DotActiv Lite on our online store, you can also find out more on our Resources page.
On top of that, we also offer a Presentation Pack, which you can use to inspire your colleagues. With this pack, you’ll get category presentations, a software demo video, and a Financial Benefits guide.
With it, you’ll be in a better position to persuade your company to see why it makes sense to implement category management in your business.
Category Management and Retail Blog
If we want to be known as a company that provides world-class category management software and services, we also need to show that we have the knowledge. That’s where our category management blog comes in.
We write weekly articles detailing all the different aspects of category management and the retail environment. Just as with the ebooks, we speak to various internal experts within DotActiv and combine that with external research so that we can write an in-depth article on the chosen topic.
You can browse through the categories section in the right-hand panel of the blog or search for a particular topic in the search bar.
You can subscribe to our blog for free.
We send out weekly emails (on a Friday morning) with a roundup of the articles we’ve published for that week. We also share information about our new blogs to our social media channels as soon as we publish them.