Success Story: Fully integrated Retail Merchandise Planning and BI

Fully integrated Merchandise Planning and BI

with N Brown

bdg and BOARD implement an agile assortment, item retail merchandise planning and BI solution

Good planning is crucial to the company’s success, especially in the fashion apparel sector, as the reaction speed and the ability to adapt quickly to changing consumer trends is now essential. Their shift from catalogue retailing to an integrated omnichannel model has also placed new planning imperatives on the Buying and Merchandising function. The existing Excel-based legacy planning capability consequently needed to be replaced with a fast, agile, fully integrated solution. In particular, the planning process was cumbersome and labour-intensive and could not be accurately and easily rolled up to company level. Not did it adequately provide both top down and bottom up planning capability. Reporting and analysis were provided by a combination of Business Objects and Excel, requiring excessive reliance on technical and business analysts resulting in bottle necks and delays.

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PROJECT OBJECTIVE

N Brown had managed to plan complex merchandise requirements in a spreadsheet environment with the attendant issues of delay, low productivity, poor visibility, poor accuracy and inability to roll up plans to company level. The goal was to deliver an agile, integrated retail merchandise planning, analytics and reporting suite to support optimised omni-channel operation across both fashion and general merchandise divisions. The solution also needed to enable self-service so that the user population could themselves identify and respond to changes in consumer trends without waiting for additional expert input.

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And find out all about the highlights:

Tailor-made BOARD solution for N Brown
Planning cycles, visibility and decision-making at all product levels shortened and simplified
Workflow ensures an appropriate level of decision-making control
The user-friendly GUI ensures that the user population readily adopt the solution

About N Brown

N Brown Group is a leading digital fashion and general merchandise retailer with 140 years of trading history. N Brown offer their customers an extensive range of products, principally clothing, footwear and homewares, through a number of power brands including Simply Be, Jacamo and JD Williams. In apparel, they are size inclusive, from 10-32 in Womenswear and S to 5XL in Menswear. This means they target and meet the needs of two significant but under-served customer groups – size 20-plus and age 50-plus. Traditionally a mail order catalogue business, N Brown now see over 60% of demand coming from online, which comes with entirely new reporting, planning and analysis requirements. In order to drive both sales and brand awareness, they also operate a small store estate in the UK, focused on key shopping areas.

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Effective planning is essential for business success. This is especially true in the fashion industry, where speed of response and adaptability to ever-changing consumer trends are now essential. In addition to market realities, N Brown’s transformation from catalogue sales to an integrated omnichannel model brought with it new requirements for planning purchasing and sales. The previously Excel-based planning was therefore to be replaced by a fast, agile and fully integrated solution. The existing complex and labour-intensive planning process could only be merged at company level in a cumbersome and imprecise way.

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