New Processes and System Drive Global Retailer’s Merchandise Planning Capability

The client is 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 retailer’s merchandise inventory planning organization was responsible for multiple business units and international operations. ​

As part of an enterprise-wide retail system transformation project, the company recognized that 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 leading practices, that would enable them to efficiently achieve their omnichannel strategy.

With client business and IT partnership, The Parker Avery Group led the design of 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) activities to support the transformation of the retailer’s planning processes and capabilities.​

Parker Avery’s major project activities for the system implementation 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 stakeholder impact assessment, communication plan, organizational structure, and training plan​
• Over 120 hours of global end-user training​