Enhanced merchandise planning for retailers

As retailers count their profits or lick their wounds after the festive shopping season, it may seem premature to plan for Christmas 2006. But in the ultra-competitive retail industry, accurate planning often means the difference between happy shareholders and bankruptcy.

"Successful retailers do more than accurately measure past performance; they also predict future demand to make the right merchandising decisions today," says Chris Dunk, Head of Retail Practice, SAS SA.

"Retailers need to move towards the necessary integration of forecasting and prediction. They can thus predict the outcome and impact of decisions, infrastructural changes, category enhancements, marketing promotions or even changes in pricing, on their sales performance," he says.

Retailers investigating business intelligence solutions should ensure they invest in an integrated merchandising system that supports financial, assortment, allocation and space management capabilities.

It should provide advanced analytical capabilities, such as statistical forecasting, from a common demand intelligence platform that enhances accuracy and enables efficient synchronisation of all plans. A good solution also offers integrated business intelligence that addresses merchandising needs beyond the planning organisation, making it easier to deliver merchandising insight to the desktop.

SAS recently launched an enhanced version of the Marketmax Integrated Merchandise Planning Solution that is effective across the merchandising organisation, providing analytic capabilities that rapidly deliver superior intelligence.

"Retailers need a planning solution that is easy to use, allows ready access to data from across the enterprise, provides accurate measures of past performance and forecasts future demand for better planning," says Dunk. "By automating planning activities, providing intelligent recommendations and removing variability from the planning process, Marketmax 6 speeds and simplifies planning for merchants, enabling them to create more effective plans despite limited resources."

As retailers seek competitive advantage, the battle lines are clearly drawn in the area of tailored assortments. Marketmax 6 addresses these challenges through large-scale planning and advanced clustering capabilities. Large-scale planning enables creation of store-specific plans. Advanced clustering groups stores based on similarities in their demand patterns.

Merchandising executives have struggled to give merchandise planners consistent best practices so that they may perform optimally. With Marketmax 6, retailers have a business-process designer that enforces best-practice processes across the organisation. SAS also offers a best-practices oriented financial and assortment planning process for soft- and hard-line retailers.

"SAS`s integrated retail offerings cover the complete spectrum of the South African retail sector`s BI requirements and cover supply chain and distribution, merchandising, store and general operations as well as retail marketing," says Dunk.