Kohl’s Optimizes the Art of Buying and Planning

Kohl’s Corporation (NYSE: KSS) is known for providing the best value products in a clean, friendly, convenient environment where it’s fun to shop. Kohl’s is also known as a company that focuses on consistent expansion and earnings growth, with plans for opening 95 new stores in 2005.

So how does Kohl’s plan to grow the business while continuing to improve the customer experience? One important component is SAS. Kohl’s has selected SAS to provide a single end-to-end system that will help Kohl’s accurately predict, analyze, optimize and support full life-cycle merchandising.

"Our partnership with SAS is a key element of our ongoing commitment to have the very best store level inventory and assortment," says John Lesko, executive vice president of administration at Kohl’s. "We selected SAS on the basis of their extensive analytical expertise, retail knowledge from the Marketmax division, resources, and executive commitment to retail and Kohl’s."

"Earlier this year, SAS set its sights on building several strategic retail partnerships to round out our fully integrated merchandise intelligence solution," says Lori J. Schafer, president of Marketmax, a division of SAS. "Due to Kohl’s expertise and because its executive team shared a similar vision, Kohl's was clearly our top choice in selecting a strategic partner. We are honored that Kohl’s has the confidence to partner with us on delivering that vision."

SAS impresses decision makers at Kohl’s
"SAS has a proven track record. It is a recognized leader in analytics, and the addition of Marketmax in 2003 solidified SAS as a leader in retail intelligence software. SAS brings a wealth of expertise to the table to help achieve results quickly," adds Lesko. "The commitment of the SAS organization and its top executives to the partnership convinced us that we’ll develop applications that will be beneficial to both organizations. We want to provide better intelligence to our planners and buyers to help them make better decisions, and allow the system to perform many of the analytical functions for them."

Growing with SAS
In addition to using SAS to optimize merchandise assortments, Kohl’s is an early adopter of the SAS Revenue Optimization Suite, the only truly integrated revenue optimization product that helps retailers manage revenue and margin through the entire merchandise life cycle.