SimStore Shopping Times Demo
(Demo is not available online)
Objective
To simulate customers with individual shopping frequencies,
day of week and time of day preferences. Then observing the
emerging customer throughput, customer shopping time and the segment
shopping behaviour.
Assumptions
Each store is represented by a Customer Segment Matrix (CSM).
Its two dimensions are:
Lifestage (11 categories), and Behavioral (10 categories
about frequency and volume of shopping).
The main assumption here is that customers in the same
segment have similar preferences in terms of frequency,
day of week and time of day of shopping.
Rule Structure
The simulator uses 3 stochastic rules linked to the customer segments:
1 - Shopping Frequency (as x times a month).
Shopping frequency is
provided in a user defined matrix (file
freq.txt)
(same as the CSM format),
as one frquency value for each segment. Individual
customers belonging to the segment can vary (+/- 50%) with a uniform
probability.
2 - Shopping day preference as a weekend to weekday ratio. This
is given in the CSM format (file wk2all.txt)
as one value for each segment, (indicating the weekdays to all ratio eg 20%)
It is only a rough guide, a value of 20% indicates that that individual prefers
to shop on a weekend with 80% likelihood.
3 - Shopping time of day probability distibution.
Time of day distributions use the 5 time bands defined
by the marketing department.
Again it is given in the CSM format as one value for each segment.
For weekdays and weekends different matrices are used (files
wkmat.txt
and
wemat.txt).
The shopping time profiles referred in these matrices are kept in
files
wkday.txt
and
weday.txt.
Each line in these files describes a probability distribution of time of day.
Users can add new profiles to these files and refer to their line number (index)
from the wkmat.txt and wemat.txt matrices. For example number 1 in the
segment Life=5, Beh=5 location will tell simulator that customers
in the Life=5, Beh=5 segment use the 2nd time of day profile
from the weday.txt file on weekends. The system ensures that each customer
is unique, following a probabilistic rule.
How to run the simulator
1 - Press Generate button to generate given number of
base customers (eg. 1000) for a given store CSM (eg.
mat.txt - here 500 customers are divided into 110 segments),
simulation start date (eg. 13th Oct 1997) and a simulation horizon (eg. 83 days)...
The system generates 500 unique
customers, only statistically fitting the customer segment matrix.
2 - Press Start button to view number of customer per time band.
The bar graph shows the customer throughput for the given (base)
number of customers. Each bar line shows the number of customers
visited the store within the time band.
Each spike (consists of 5 bar lines) constitutes a day.
3 - The simulation can be paused, continued, or stopped by
pressing relevant buttons
4 - Press CusQuery button with a customer number in the next Text Field.
The system will report all visits for that customer in the Text Area below.
5 - Press SegQuery button with a Lifestage segment number and a Behavioural
Segment number (placed in the relevant Text Fields). The simulator will report the number of customers (in that segment) for each time slice of the whole of simulation period.
6 - Press Layout button to start Store Layout Simulator.