SAS^® Integrated Merchandise Planning

Commitment to customer centricity in today’s economy has upped the stakes of the merchandise planning process, amplifying the need for precision. Your assortment plans must anticipate demand and relate directly to financial plans, space plans and brand strategies. Every merchandise plan must be accurate down to the local market and store levels.

In the Spotlight SAS, customers start retail 'evolution' with enhanced merchandise planning power

As part of an integrated suite of solutions for merchandise intelligence, SAS Integrated Merchandise Planning delivers everything you need to create accurate plans that optimize every SKU across all stores and channels.

Only SAS offers an integrated merchandise planning system that includes statistical forecasting, integrated business intelligence and the scalability to meet your needs for store-level merchandise plans. With SAS Integrated Merchandise Planning, you can:

Develop and implement optimal merchandise plans down to the store level. The solution includes integrated forecasting, easy access to relevant data and support for large plan sizes. Performance analysis enables you to identify trends, gaps and opportunities by analyzing data at any level of the location, time or merchandise hierarchy. Create better plans despite limited resources. With automated planning and a built-in planning process design module, this solution provides intelligent recommendations and removes variability from the planning process. Ensure consistent performance and increase accountability. Use standard KPIs to maintain consistent measurement between departments, categories and locations. Integration with SAS Business Intelligence makes it easy to share performance information with the rest of the organization.

SAS^® Integrated Merchandise Planning includes:

• SAS Merchandise Financial Planning – Set merchandise financial goals based on past, present and future demand.
• SAS Merchandise In-Season Management – Facilitate control of merchandise spending through open-to-buy, and quickly respond to emerging business trends to maximize inventory investments and reduce liabilities.
• SAS Merchandise Assortment Planning – Build the ideal breadth and depth of product to match your customers' needs and support your financial goals.
• SAS Space Planning – Visually plan active assortments to ensure a consistent shopping experience. Meet margin and inventory goals by assuring that available space is optimized.
• SAS Space Optimizer – Automate the development of optimized store specific planograms when you deploy this application with SAS Space Planning.
• SAS Merchandise Allocation – Analyze store-specific needs and improve inventory management with allocation and replenishment of basic, fashion and promotional merchandise.
• SAS Demand Forecasting for Retail – Accurately anticipate and shape future customer demand for all types of products, ranging from fast-moving consumer goods to fashion apparel. SAS' unique high-performance forecasting engine automatically diagnoses, models, executes and reconciles forecasts across multiple merchandise levels and locations.
• SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail – Ensure your customers are offered the right product range with tailored local-market assortments built for ideal store clusters derived from actual customer demand.