SAS Enhances Merchandise Planning for Retailers

As retailers count their profits or lick their wounds from another roller-coaster holiday shopping season, it may seem premature to plan for Christmas 2006. But in the ultra-competitive retail industry, accurate planning often means the difference between happy shareholders and bankruptcy. Successful retailers do more than accurately measure past performance; they also predict future demand to make the right merchandising decisions today.

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today launched an enhanced version of the Marketmax® Integrated Merchandise Planning Solution. Marketmax 6 is an integrated merchandising system that supports financial, assortment, allocation and space management capabilities. Using SAS®9,  the solution provides:

• Advanced analytical capabilities, such as statistical forecasting, from a common demand intelligence platform that enhances accuracy and enables efficient synchronization of all plans.
• Business process design functionality that enables alignment of user views with planning process activities.
• Integrated business intelligence that addresses merchandising needs beyond the planning organization and makes it easier to deliver merchandising insight to the desktop.
• Industry-leading data integration capabilities that make it easier to create and maintain a merchandise-planning system that serves as single version of the truth.

Automated, accurate planning
“Merchandise planning is a complicated process. Assortment plans must complement financial plans, space plans, brand goals and more. And these plans must be consistent down to the local market and store levels,” says Stan Tusman, executive vice president for inventory control and information systems at Bakers Footwear. “We are excited about the capabilities of Marketmax 6 and it will be an integral part of reinventing our merchandising organization.”

Marketmax 6 delivers a system that is usable and effective across the merchandising organization, providing analytic capabilities that rapidly deliver superior intelligence.

“Retailers need a planning solution that's easy to use, allows ready access to data from across the enterprise, provides accurate measures of past performance and forecasts future demand for better planning,” says Lori Schafer, vice president, SAS global retail practice. “By automating planning activities, providing intelligent recommendations and removing variability from the planning process, Marketmax 6 speeds and simplifies planning for merchants, enabling them to create more effective plans despite limited resources.”

As retailers seek competitive advantage, the battle lines are clearly drawn in the area of tailored assortments. Marketmax 6 addresses these challenges through large-scale planning and advanced clustering capabilities. Large-scale planning enables creation of store-specific plans. Advanced clustering groups stores based on similarities in their demand patterns.

Merchandising executives have struggled to give merchandise planners consistent best practices so that they may perform optimally. With Marketmax 6, retailers have a business-process designer that enforces best-practice processes across the organization. SAS also offers a best-practices oriented financial and assortment planning process for soft- and hard-line retailers.