Vendor/Wholesale

Consumer Centric Retailing
Cross Channel Merchandise & Assortment Management

Optimize your assortments – style/color/size by door.
Founded in 1999, 7thonline is the leading provider of planning, demand forecasting, and optimization solutions to the apparel, footwear, and accessories retail community.

The complexity and fast-paced nature of the apparel, footwear, and accessories markets hinder the merchant's ability to execute profit maximizing sales plans. The account planning process involves vast amounts of dynamic demand and supply information and input from multiple parties across various business functions. The coordination, analysis, and sharing of this information both internally and among trading partners is critical to delivering the right styles, colors, and sizes to each store to match local demand. Furthermore, vendors are often forced to commit to production in advance of receiving orders from their retail accounts. Accordingly, it is critical to gather indications of demand as early in the process as possible. Increasing demand and supply visibility and shortening timelines are essential to improving the bottom line.

7thonline, the leader in cross channel merchandise and assortment management addresses these challenges with its sales planning, demand forecasting, execution, and optimization solutions. These solutions enable merchants to work more intelligently and efficiently by leveraging the power of “art and science”. With the visibility provided, management can be confident that financial and strategic business objectives are met and that they are investing in a merchandise mix that maximizes profit potential.

7thonline enables vendors to maximize the profitability of sales plans with its intelligent visibility platform built specifically for the apparel, footwear, and accessories community. The solutions enable vendors to create optimal localized sales plans (for key items, fashion, and replenishment) by retailer by SKU by store cluster, with built-in optimization engines for sizing and assortment breadth and depth. The real-time production sales reconciliation capabilities provide an instantaneous snapshot of total company demand vs. supply at any time prior to, during and post market buying periods. The collaborative capabilities enable internal users and trading partners to align business processes and strategies and to share up-to-date information 24/7. With the comprehensive business intelligence tools, management has complete visibility into all planning activity to ensure that plans are aligned with corporate objectives and to react to opportunities and challenges as they arise.

Planning

Assortment Planning
7thonline Assortment Planning enables vendors to create optimal localized assortments (for key items, fashion, and replenishment) by retailer by SKU by store, with built-in optimization engines for sizing and assortment breadth and depth. Management has 24/7 visibility into all planning activity to ensure alignment with corporate objectives and to react to opportunities and challenges as they arise.



KEY CAPABILITIES
  • Input or upload financial and unit plans
  • Execute visual and quantitative door-level assortments by season for key items, fashion, and replenishment
  • Import LY POS data for use in planning and reporting
  • Create Master Assortments top-down or bottom-up
  • Automatically generate initial plan based on historical data and defined parameters
  • Access up-to-date product data and images (automatically updated in real-time across all plans)
  • Replenishment planning by style/color by retailer, based on LY
  • POS data, to be aggregated with fashion buys
  • Collaborate on plans internally and with retailers
  • Compare planned and booked units across all accounts and distribution channels against inventory
  • View real-time available-to-sell by style/size/group/class
  • Apply optimal size scales to each order
  • Generate EDI purchase orders with one-click
  • Access system 24/7, from any Internet browser

KEY BENEFITS
  • Higher sell-thru/reduced markdowns
  • Additional sales opportunities realized due to demand visibility gained earlier in market (up to 25%)
  • Reduced end-of-season excess inventory (up to 50%)
  • Increased order fill rates (up to 15%)
  • Production demand reconciliation 4 - 6 weeks earlier
  • Earlier retail order commitments (up to 4 weeks)
  • Reduced administrative costs (30 - 80%) and decreased error rates (50 - 80%)
  • Ability to shift from cut-to-forecast to cut-to-order

Demand Forecasting

In-Season Inventory Management
Your goods are on the selling floor - how are they performing? How can you take advantage of the hot sellers to proactively drive more sales this season? Given the current trend, how can you adjust future season plans and production orders to maximize sales and reduce excess inventory. Though many retailers and vendors have access to POS data, it is often not in a format in which they can assess and react to the current performance of the floor inventory. 7thonline In-Season Inventory Management, an automated POS dashboard and reporting tool, provides a real-time view of current performance together with guidance for price and inventory adjustment. The embedded, easy-to-use business intelligence enables merchants to create custom reports on the fly. This user-friendly solution enables retailers and vendors to identify additional sales opportunities and to more accurately plan future inventories.

KEY CAPABILITIES
  • View LY vs. Plan vs. Projection vs. Actual (Sales, Inventory, Receipts) by SKU in one place; understand which products are over performing or under-performing by style/color/size
  • Re-projects Sales, Inventory, & Receipts based on actual performance and user modifications
  • Ability to proactively identify and execute in-season reorders
  • Ability to adjust future plans based on current trend
  • Build custom reports on the fly with embedded, domain-specific business intelligence tools
  • For replenishment inventory, provides direction on production orders given retail demand
  • Forecasting capabilities

KEY BENEFITS
  • Higher sales and gross margin realization from the current floor inventory
  • Better planning of the future merchandise assortment

Execution

eShowroom
7thonline eSHOWROOM is a virtual showroom and EDI-enabled order placement application for use between vendors and their specialty retailer trading partners. Sales representatives can access the system 24/7 from an internet browser to manage accounts on the road, at tradeshows, and in the office. Buyers can view real-time product information and images and transmit orders electronically over the internet at any time. The tool enables a more efficient, proactive, and accurate process for managing a large number of smaller buys. Many of the costs associated with manual data entry, order processing, and errors are eliminated.



KEY CAPABILITIES
  • Easily navigable platform for viewing and ordering
  • View up-to-date product images and line sheet data
  • Easy to build and maintain eSHOWROOM
  • Customer specific pricing and product catalogs
  • Communicate product information instantly via batch email with trading partners
  • Easy-to-use shopping bag check-out process
  • Specialty store orders can be aggregated with other retail demand to compare against the inventory file

KEY BENEFITS
  • Proactive selling tool to communicate one-to-many
  • Higher sales through increased market exposure to the specialty store retail community
  • Significantly lower costs of communicating with and managing specialty store accounts
  • Improved customer service - provides buyers with 24/7 ordering capabilities and real-time access to current product information
  • Reduced time, expense, and errors associated with manual order entry and order management
  • EDI-enables even the smallest specialty retailers without integration

Order & Execution

In order to execute merchandise orders in an efficient manner, trading partner data and systems must be in sync. This can be challenging given the diversity of systems and data requirements among retailers and manufacturers. 7thonline Order & Execution enables vendors to efficiently and cost-effectively work with specific retailers' merchandising systems for streamlined order execution and real-time communication of information.

7thonline Order & Execution is a hosted web-based platform where line sheet and order information can be exchanged between trading partner systems in real-time, in the correct format for each party. With access to up-to-date data, merchants can ensure that orders are accurate and executed in a timely manner. Manual activities and errors are significantly reduced given the process automation and system validation of data.

KEY CAPABILITIES
  • One-click auto-download of line sheet information into retailer's defined template
  • Assign and validate retailer's specific attributes to the style information template
  • Receive and validate a sized bulk order from retailer
  • Auto-populate the ERP system via EDI or FTP flat file order
  • Aggregated view of retailer's orders at multiple levels (month, class, group, category, etc.)
  • Create a recommended buy for retailer
  • Compare bulk order to recommended buy
KEY BENEFITS
  • One version of the truth: real-time sharing of accurate, up-to-date product and order information in required format for both parties
  • Streamlined planning and ordering process
  • Earlier identification of opportunities and challenges
  • Earlier order placement
  • On-time deliveries
  • Reduced manual activity, errors, and administrative costs
  • Improved customer service
  • 24/7 accessibility & portability

Line Sheet Management

With 7thonline Line Sheet Management, vendors can access and export a professional catalog of available products (account specific if needed) for reporting and for external sharing with buyers. Merchants need only an Internet connection to view and download line sheets. For those vendors who do not use 7thonline Assortment Planning, line sheet information can be uploaded for electronic sharing and for automated population of retailer plans via the 7thonline Sales Planning & Execution solution.

KEY CAPABILITIES
  • Provides 24/7 access to up-to-date product information and images from any Internet browser
  • Instantaneous excel/PDF line sheet report generation (including product attributes and images)
  • Daily feed from PLM/PDM systems to automatically update added, dropped, or changed styles
  • Automated notification of aggregated changes
  • Flexible account-specific fields and reports
  • Automated upload to retail systems and auto-population of plans via 7thonline Sales Planning & Execution

KEY BENEFITS
  • Internal and external sharing of up-to-date product information - one version of the truth
  • 24/7 accessibility & portability
  • Reduced manual activity and errors associated with creating, maintaining, and sharing line sheets
  • Professional and print-friendly format of line sheet information and images
  • Improved customer service

Optimization

With 7thonline's powerful optimization engines, merchants can translate otherwise unwieldy data into localized assortments – SKU by store – that provide maximum profit potential. Our proprietary algorithms are currently being used by some of the largest fashion retailers and vendors in the US, with documented results of up to 14 percentage point increases in full price sell-thru.

Assortment Optimization

7thonline Assortment Optimization generates the recommended distribution of purchasing dollars across various categories and classes of merchandise by store as well as the SKU breadth and depth by store required to maximize gross margin.

Size Optimization

7thonline Size Optimization determines the optimal size ratios by location, pre-pack design, and size distribution by store (for both open stock and pre-packs) required to maximize gross margin.

KEY BENEFITS
  • Increased sell-thru (up to 14 percentage points)
  • Reduced stock-outs (up to 15 percentage points)
  • Increased inventory productivity (reduce under-performing SKUs; invest more in strong performers)
  • Clients can mirror the size profile of local demand at the style attribute and door level
  • Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty through localization of assortments
  • Reduced administrative activities and errors