Planning allocation Find out how to optimize your inventory, how to handle different types of merchandise, and the benefits of pre-planning allocations. APT begins development on a best-of-breed merchandising application, built upon the Oracle platform. Sears Womenswear and Manor are the first clients. Other clients include New Look, Harvey Nichols, Bay Trading, and Country Casuals. MSG changes its name to Unlimited Solutions (USI), and develops a best-of-breed, Windows-based, object-oriented POS application called Coalition". Arcadia Group installs Coalition" in over 2,000 stores. MMS implements its best-of-breed Planning Allocation applications at clients such as Ann Taylor, Talbots, Ames, Lane Bryant, and Carson Pirie Scott. North American-based companies STS and USI follow ACI's lead by opening offices in the UK. Connected Retailer® Planning Allocation Solution integrates Merchandise Planning and Allocation — for the chain and store — with Assortment Planning and Visual Planning. It links top-level financial requirements with micro-market variables to successfully marry supply with demand, optimizing margins, turns, and the overall profitability of both merchandise and locations. Our Planning Solution allows you to create a compelling shopping experience in exciting environments that are in tune with your customers' lifestyles, values, and desires. It integrates product and store design with planning and merchandising processes to meet your customers’ distinctive needs. By accounting for forecasted sales and inventory budgets, and combining numeric and visual product information, our Planning Solution enables you to plan from your customer's point of view. This consumer-led perspective can help you re-engineer your organization for more productive "lifestyle" retailing. Business Challenge Successful retail executives agree that having accurate, reliable transaction data enter their enterprise applications is key to their companies’ success. Accurate and timely data capture is required to feed crucial information downstream to enterprise applications such as merchandising, sales reporting, inventory control, customer relationship management (CRM), and general ledger systems. It’s also important for retailers to keep pace with rapidly changing, competitive business environments. The globalization of retail, and the trends toward mergers, acquisitions, and cross-channel selling, present retailers with the issues of integrating, managing, and interpreting transaction data from multiple, often inconsistent, sources. Many retailers who, only a few years ago, operated in one country, or solely via brick-and-mortar stores, are now running operations across multiple countries, time zones, retail formats, and banners on a variety of point of sale devices. A flexible, scalable, and centralized sales analytics and audit solution that adapts to your unique retail environment is a key factor in helping your business achieve a competitive edge. |Planning allocation|Planning and Allocation|Retail Systems|Merchandising|