Project Description
Selection of a multi-channel merchandise planning and allocation solution to drive sales and gross profit growth.
The Client
A privately owned, $350M specialty multi-channel retailer of softlines and hardlines with a loyal customer following.
The Challenge
The business had a strategic initiative to design a multi-channel merchandise planning and allocation process and system to drive sales and gross profit growth. The challenges they faced were:
- Retail and catalog channels executed some form of planning; however, little or no planning existed in the ecommerce and wholesale channels
- No integrated calendar or process
- Plans were created in Excel and made the process manual and hard to get to lower levels of planning
- Channels shared one inventory pool, therefore plans needed to be consolidated
- Replenishment system was used for store allocations
The Parker Avery Solution
The Parker Avery Group assisted in selecting a merchandise planning and allocation solution to enable the business' strategic initiatives. Leveraging deep retail system selection experience, Parker Avery performed the following key activities:
- Understanding current planning and fulfillment processes and systems
- Benchmarking current state against leading practices
- Developing future planning and allocation process, roles, and responsibilities to support new processes
- Developing business and technical requirements
- Analyzing vendor landscape and facilitating vendor demos and visits for a 'best fit' selection
- Developing a three-year roadmap, business case, ROI, and high level implementation plan
The Result
As a result of the project, the client expects to see:
- An ongoing cash benefit of $5.5M annually
- Increased inventory productivity
- Cleaner seasonal transitions
- Integrated sales and inventory forecasting
- Improved planning efficiency and accuracy
- Decreased aging stock
