Leverage Analytics to Drive Merchandise Financial Planning

MFP Intelligence, Parker Avery’s merchandise financial planning analytics solution, incorporates an analytics-driven demand forecast into a series of actionable reports that are designed to work together to improve planner effectiveness both pre-season and in-season.

An accurate and reliable demand signal is critical to pre-season merchandise financial planning and equally important for effectively managing the in-season open-to-buy process. A key element of Parker Avery’s innovative “results as a service” offerings, our dynamic demand signal adapts quickly to changing trends and promotional activity.

Our MFP Intelligence approach allows our clients to maximize time to value by minimizing implementation timeframes to as few as six weeks. Additionally, our team’s extensive retail industry expertise enables us to integrate these analytic insights into your enterprise’s end-to-end merchandising process.

Pre-Season Demand Forecast

Our offering leverages your historical data and our proprietary demand analytics platform to create an analytics-driven demand signal that provides insights into pre-season planning. These insights influence the strategic and financial planning processes to support the total company demand.

In-Season Demand Forecast

Our in-season demand forecast provides actionable open-to-buy (OTB) insights by producing performance metrics designed by career-long retail planning experts. This approach provides unparalleled daily insights into future demand, thereby giving planners the ability to identify risks and opportunities by category and react quickly to changes in-season.

Sophisticated Demand Platform

The underlying forecasts and elasticities are produced using a next generation dynamic aggregation algorithm, cutting edge demand driver elasticity modeling, and machine learning based disaggregation.

MFP Intelligence Services

  • Planning report showing the pre-season demand forecast by month for the year
  • In-season OTB report comparing demand forecast to actuals, last year, and the last captured forecast
  • Variance reporting to track the forecast accuracy
  • Training and rollout support to ensure effective execution
  • Integration of forecast recommendations into existing planning and reporting tools
  • Change management and sustainment workshops
  • Communication plan and execution
  • Adoption reporting to track use of the demand forecast in the business process
  • Outputs and results in as few as six weeks from initial data load

Demonstrated Benefits

Our clients have realized meaningful financial and operational benefits, such as:

  • Improvement in forecast accuracy of 10 to 15%
  • Reduced or eliminated manual forecasting
  • Purchasing aligned to performing categories
  • Improved turnover
  • Better inventory productivity
  • Lower markdowns and improved margins
  • More effective planners
  • More time to focus on assortment performance and strategic initiatives
SEE DEMAND INTELLIGENCE

Contact us to discuss how Parker Avery can solve your challenges.

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