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Fast, Accurate MerchandisingSport Chalet is a growing specialty chain that wanted to do a better job with assortments, pricing, promotions, space plans and allocations. SAS® Merchandise Intelligence Solutions makes that happen by churning through volumes of data quickly to create information the company's buyers and merchandisers need to drive revenue. 
Check out this video to learn more about Sport Chalet and its successes with SAS.View Video (Runtime: 4 mins, 52 secs)You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q& A. 
Ted Jackson
Vice President of Information Technology Sport Chalet View Video 
Jason Gautereaux
Vice President of Planning & Inventory Management Sport Chalet View Video (Requires Windows Media Player 6.4.7 or higher or RealPlayer 6 or higher) Need scuba gear, rental skis, a package of golf lessons or mountain climbing gear? For 45 years Sport Chalet has been Southern California's premier retailer of specialty sports equipment. In the past decade, the chain's growth has taken off as it has branched out to other parts of California, Nevada and Arizona. To accommodate growth and stave off competition from bigger sporting goods chains and niche sports retailers, Sport Chalet sought better ways to select and manage inventory. In the past, Sport Chalet cobbled together numerous "best of breed" software packages to do everything from gauge customer demand to control inventory. Often, different people used different formulas to calculate results. There was no one version of the truth, it took too long to run reports and there was no fast, accurate way to customize product by store.
Like many retailers, Sport Chalet tended to send each store the same amount of goods in most merchandise categories and restocked with little view toward per-store sales trends. "If a store sold item A, they would get another item A sent to them," Gautereaux says. Now, the company looks at which stores sell what types of product in the greatest quantities and allocates that demand. Not only are customers more likely to find what they want in the right size or color, the presentations are more appealing. Stores receive a larger amount of their best selling products and can create a more visually dynamic display. This has also freed the buyers to focus on finding the best and most desirable products. This is particularly critical for Sport Chalet as some of their specialty sports gear has very long lead times for placing orders. SAS allows buyers to make strategic and product life cycle plans. The company has also been able to make better decisions about what items to put on sale or put on clearance and when to do that. Gautereaux says it is now much easier to spot trends in sales, especially as they relate to regional differences.
The standard data doesn't cramp what Jackson terms the "arty" side of a merchandiser's job. "It still leaves room for merchandisers to do different types of analysis and approach problems differently based on their business experience. It is the best of both worlds." It is also an experience that saves a tremendous amount of time. One report that Gautereaux ran involved gathering detailed information from every store. It typically took a day or more to process. With SAS, Gautereaux built the query and had the answer in eight minutes. Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
Ted Jackson
Chief Information Officer Sport Chalet
Challenge:
Sport Chalet needs to better allocate merchandise and track sales by category as it increases its store counts.
Solution:
SAS® Merchandise Intelligence Solutions help Sport Chalet stock its stores with the right mix appropriate for each region.
Benefits:
Reports that typically took a day or more to produce now take only minutes, saving time and money. "SAS was the only company that shared with us their vision of how we could grow together. SAS gives us a real partnership." Jason Gautereaux, Vice President of Planning and Inventory Management Read more:
This story appears in the Fourth Quarter 2006 issue of
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For Jason Gautereaux, Vice President of Merchandise Planning and Inventory Management, SAS' key advantage was its strategic vision and sound financial footing coupled with its ability to deliver all the products in an integrated database. "SAS was the only company that shared with us their vision of how we could grow together. SAS gives us a real partnership."
