SAS^® Supply Chain Costing for Retail

What is the net profitability of each product or product category? Which products or product categories should you promote or stock more heavily? Which suppliers and categories are delivering the best value? How are supply chain decisions impacting the true profitability of each product or product category? Are purchasing and distribution decisions optimized across locations, suppliers and categories? Could costs be trimmed without sacrificing quality, performance or supplier relationships?

Organizations competing in the retail industry have long struggled to answer questions like these using ad hoc cost analysis, spreadsheets and internally built systems designed for individual departments. Until recently this type of analysis and gross cost information was used to support marketing and merchandising decisions. Now, however, with profit margins shrinking, retailers need an extra edge to establish sustainable competitive advantage – they need accurate, unified cost information across departments and across the entire supply chain.

SAS Supply Chain Costing for Retail answers such questions with clarity. Using data from your existing operational systems, this solution calculates costs across the entire supply chain, down to the SKU level. Combining advanced data management with an industry proven retail-specific costing methodology, you gain full financial visibility as products move through distribution centers, stores and customer checkouts. You can also model alternative logistics scenarios and predict the financial impact of different assumptions and scenarios.

Merchandising and marketing decisions can now be based on genuine understanding of net profitability by item, category, supplier and store – reflecting all the interdependencies of complex supply chains.

SAS Supply Chain Costing for Retail provides visibility into net product profitability information that helps companies make more profitable, fact based decisions around product assortments, new product introductions, promotions and alterations in supply chain processes.

The solution offers:

• Net profitability analysis by item, category, supplier and store for better merchandising decisions.
• Automated processes for calculating accurate costs of products across the retail supply chain.
• Modeling of supply chain costs under different assumptions and scenarios.
• A unique, industry-validated costing methodology for capturing supply chain costs at any level.
• Preconfigured, retail-specific templates to help jump start implementation.
• A scalable architecture for ongoing analysis of all product lines and the entire supplier base.
• A series of prespecified reports.

Comprehensive retail intelligence
SAS Supply Chain Costing for Retail is available as part of SAS Retail Intelligence Solutions, a suite of software and services that combines award-winning analytic and data warehousing technology with decades of industry experience. Through proven, prebuilt processes, techniques and models, SAS Retail Intelligence Solutions speed up both implementation and results.