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When merchandise planning is done correctly, customers find the products they want. When it fails, retailers are faced with clearance markdowns, broken assortments, unbalanced inventories, unprofitable departments, and unhappy customers. Retailers have to set pre-season planning, financial, sales, and margin goals and then execute against these goals, re-setting targets and re-planning during the season based on actual demand signals.
The i2 Solution: i2 Merchandise Planner
i2 Merchandise Planner is a powerful financial, category, and assortment planning tool with deep reporting capabilities. It can enable retailers to increase sales and profits while meeting inventory goals by determining the right products to carry for each store.
Key capabilities of i2 Merchandise Planner can include:
- Supporting long-range, three-to-five-year strategic planning through to short-term re-planning
- Creating “one-number” plans that align high-level boardroom goals with proposals from buying and sales departments
- Conducting planning processes by product and by store over different time periods
- Allowing for assortment planning at store, store-cluster, or regional levels
- Providing visibility into plan exceptions
- Analyzing alternate scenarios before deploying
- Managing pre-season and in-seson plans
Benefits of i2 Merchandise Planner can include:
- Improved control of the budgeting process, both pre-season and in-season
- Increased sales
- Reduced cost of markdowns, leading to higher margins
- Reduced inventory
- Improved control of open-to-buy management
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