Project Description
Widespread transformation of planning processes and capabilities to support strategic growth plans, standardize business processes, and improve key retail performance measurements
The Client
A global direct retailer of women’s, men’s, and children’s apparel, as well as home accessories, operating significant catalog and internet channels, along with both company-owned and shop-in-shop brick-and-mortar locations
The Challenge
The retailer's merchandise inventory planning organization was responsible for multiple business units and international operations. As part of an enterprise-wide system transformation project, the company recognized that in order to support its growth initiatives, the planning organization needed to move away from homegrown excel-based tools and adopt standardized processes and tools, guided by industry leading practices, that would enable them to efficiently achieve their omnichannel strategy.
The Parker Avery Solution
With client business and IT partnership, The Parker Avery Group developed new planning processes and configured a best-of-breed planning system to deliver the desired future state merchandise financial planning capabilities.
The team also delivered all testing, training, and organizational change management (OCM) to support the transformation of the planning processes and capabilities.
Major project activities included:
- Business process design including the end-to-end inventory planning process
- Application configuration, implementation, and support
- Solution, integration, and user-acceptance testing
- Change management strategy including impact assessment, communication plan, organizational structure, and training plan
- Over 120 hours of training for global end-users
The Result
As a result of the project, the client is able to create efficient and detailed omnichannel merchandise financial plans that push strategic targets across multiple levels of the product and location hierarchies for both pre-season and in-season planning cycles.
Additionally, the client expects to achieve the following benefits:
- Enhanced product planning, management, and analysis capabilities
- Standardized tools and processes with consistent data driving increased collaboration, productivity, and transparency
- Improved sales, margin, and inventory utilization