Delivering an Intelligent Platform to Plan
Built-in Business Intelligence
Every retailer is challenged with how to effectively plan and execute unique store-level assortments that match local consumer demand. In order to determine the profit-maximizing merchandise mix for each location, retailers must consider vast amounts of dynamic demand and supply information, product/location attributes, historical performance, current trends, and strategic and financial objectives. The necessary information often resides on disparate systems or spreadsheets, and decisions involve input from multiple parties across various business functions.
7thonline planning solution provides an intelligent platform to coordinate, analyze, and share this dynamic information in real-time and to translate it into optimal merchandise plans and localized assortments – style/color/size by store by week. The forecast-driven system enables the merchant to intelligently seed assortments based on defined demand drivers, promotional/markdown strategies, historical performance and product/location attributes. The solution integrates both the art and science of merchandising in a user-friendly environment to facilitate merchant usability and adoption. Management has complete visibility into all planning activity to ensure that plans are aligned with corporate objectives and have the ability to react to opportunities and challenges as they arise.
KEY CAPABILITIES
- Build profit-maximizing merchandise plans driven by current forecasts
- Build door-level merchandise plans driven by forecasts; forecasts are based on current trend as well as multiple year historical seasonal selling patterns
- Reconcile top-down vs. bottom-up and historical vs. forecast
- Produce optimal assortments driven by forecasts
- Build optimized assortment plans - style, color, and size by store by week - to meet local demand and satisfy business objectives
- Intelligently build assortments with business drivers (e.g. target stores, lifecycle, sales potential, distribution constraints, etc.) to automatically generate store plans and quantities
- Determine and incorporate promotional/markdown strategies
- Generate optimal category, class, and SKU breadth and depth to meet local demand
- Localization of assortment to match customer demand
- Capture product and store attributes for better targeting local customers
- User definable planning worksheet to build assortment by attribute
- Recommend target stores for products with certain attributes based on local demand
- Visibility and “One Version of the Truth”
- Industry specific reporting/analytics, from the widest company roll-up down to SKU by location by week
- Visibility to modifications through out the planning process
- Build custom reports on the fly
- Embedded, domain-specific business intelligence tools for custom reporting (e.g. LY and POS analysis)
- No additional cost or implementation
- User-friendly: simple user interface, non-IT dependent
- Ladder Planning
- Track and adjust weekly flow planning activity (sales and receipts) by item by location; automatically reconciles to assortment plan
- Extend to Order Execution and In-Season Management
- Execute assortment plans from product selection through order placement and to collaborate with trading partners on product data and plans
- Track in-season performance and forecast sales, inventory, and receipts by week creating your weekly OTB
KEY BENEFITS
- Merchandise plans driven by current forecasts: maximize profit potential of merchandise plans by leveraging in-season data and multiple year historical seasonal selling patterns.
- Optimized assortments to meet local demand, style/color/size by door: localized assortments drive sell-thru, reduce markdowns, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reduce stockouts and overstocks.
- 360° Fully integrated solution: top-down, bottom-up, forecasted, and historical plans on one platform; current forecasts can drive future season plans.
- Real-Time, “One Version of the Truth”: instantaneously view up-to-date organization-wide activity and SKU by store by week detail for better decision making, 24/7 via Internet browser
- Communication and collaboration: share real-time financial and assortment plans at any time
- Optimization engines: solve for maximum profitability at the style/color/size by store level with proven optimization algorithms
- Reduced operational costs: significantly reduced administrative tasks and error rates
