Fast, Accurate Merchandising

Sport 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.

Customer Viewpoint

Ted Jackson
Vice President of Information Technology
Sport Chalet

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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.

SAS' key advantage was its strategic vision and sound financial footing coupled with its ability to deliver all the products in an integrated database.

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. 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 involved gathering detailed information from every store. It typically took a day or more to process. With SAS, the query was built and had the answer received eight minutes.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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