SAS^® Space Planning

Effective retail space planning is a key part of the merchandise planning life cycle. A well-designed shopping environment attracts customers, prevents stockouts, drives inventory productivity, reduces operating costs and, most importantly, improves the financial performance of the store.

In the Spotlight Avoid Stock-Outs With Space Optimization Solution Read about the S-group's implementation of SAS Space Planning in this article from Integrated Solutions For Retailers, August 2008.

SAS Space Planning combines a rich set of analytical capabilities and easy-to-use graphical tools to help you align store space allocations and shelf assortments with consumer demand.

SAS Space Planning lets you manage assortment-to-space allocation hierarchically, with both top-down and bottom-up views of performance. Fully integrated with SAS Merchandise Planning, the solution gives you detailed, end-to-end control of the entire planning process – financial, assortment and space – within a single data repository. And when deployed with SAS Space Optimizer, the solution enables automated generation of ideal store-specific planograms.

Benefits:

• Increase revenue and inventory productivity.
  Meet customer demand, drive top-line sales and maximize returns through optimized assortment-to-space allocations.
• More efficiently map assortments to planograms.
  With SAS Space Planning, you deploy assortment plans on planograms that incorporate best practice visual merchandising to enhance the customer’s shopping experience.
• Improve planogram performance visibility.
  Because SAS Space Planning provides easy access to detailed information about each planogram component, you can assess performance more accurately.
• Enhance planogram content and change communications.
  Create clear planogram reports, efficiently distribute them to stores and provide easy-to-use Web-based layouts so that staff can expedite planogram changes.

Key Features:

• Location hierarchy management – Define and manage the location hierarchy using spreadsheets and graphical views at each level.
• Store location dimensions and positioning – Define and manipulate store, department, area and planogram locations with a drag-and-drop interface.
• Planogram assignment and versioning – Manage the complete planogram life cycle: remerchandise, substitute products, change assortment mix and modify fixtures.
• Planogram publishing and sharing – Configure planograms in graphical or spreadsheet views, distribute them to stores in PDF or HTML formats and share planograms with vendors (with SAS Planogram Collaborator).
• Space calculations – Improve planning with financial performance reports that incorporate calculations of capacity, allocated space and used space.
• Automated store-specific planogramming with SAS^® Space Optimizer – Automate planogram creation, based on the category-level space plan, the desired assortment and the physical layout and fixture dimensions of each store.

SAS Space Planning is part of SAS® Integrated Merchandise Planning, which provides complete planning capabilities for the merchandising process, including performance analysis, financial planning, assortment planning, space planning, allocation and more.