Better Retail Planning
Beyond Excel
“This seems unnecessarily complicated to me!” Many in retail will recognise this phrase – you may have heard it or even thought it yourself. But there is no doubt that retail has become one of the most complex industries. Fierce price wars, global supply chains, e-commerce, increasing demands from end customers, calculating storage costs, risk management: even economic thinking has changed.
In most other sectors, selling off products is seen as a success, but for retailers it is a missed opportunity. At the same time, it can be fatal for a company to tie up working capital in stock that cannot be sold. The merchandiser’s job is to find the balance here, which requires enormous precision and foresight.
To fulfil this requirement, they have to deal with a mountain of data – analysing, evaluating, planning, running through scenarios and finally making the best possible decision. They often implement the entire process in MS Excel, as an industry-specific software solution (Industry Solution) is out of the question for many for cost reasons.
bdg ONE | Retail is our answer to the needs of medium-sized companies in the retail sector in particular. It combines best practices with our many years of experience from the numerous retail projects that we have successfully implemented. Thanks to a high degree of prefabrication, bdg ONE | Retail can be implemented very quickly, but can still be customised to the specific needs of the respective company – keyword: modular principle.
bdg ONE | Retail was developed specifically for the retail sector. Its own features and functions simplify work steps that are normally very time-consuming, such as store planning, line planning, WSSI/MFP and assortment planning. The “lock” and “spread/splash” functions allow you to customise large quantities of planning data with just a few clicks.
Of course, linking many data sheets on a single platform does not reduce the amount of data. But it does make it clearer and easier to maintain. In bdg ONE | Retail, data sheets are cascaded according to their hierarchy. For example, you receive an overview of your merchandise planning – and can see from there with a deep-dive which data the overview is based on. This results in a “single point of truth” and all colleagues receive the same, correct figures at all times.
bdg ONE | Retail automates the central planning processes. Sales data can be simulated on a large scale using scattering procedures. A variety of distribution options enable the automatic filling of tables and plans, for example with data from the last (LY) or penultimate (LY-1) year. Alternatively, the software calculates the “curve” of sales figures over the season from the previous year’s data, which you can then adjust according to strategic decisions and estimates, and fills the plan automatically.
A single product range plan for all shops? Hardly any retail company can survive today with this approach. As the choice available to customers has increased, for example due to the growth of online retail, customers’ expectations regarding the variety of the product range have also risen. Assortment planning in bdg ONE | Retail therefore takes into account the various dimensions of customer demand and adapts the assortment accordingly. Attributes such as brand, price, discounting, fabric type, trend, graphic size, colour mix, climate, regional affluence, etc. are used to develop a more customer-oriented approach.
Every newly implemented software also requires change management. However, this topic is often not sufficiently taken into account. bdg’s solutions are extremely intuitive and closely aligned with existing business processes. This makes change management much easier and noticeably increases adoption rates.
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