Merchandising and Category Management Services

Core merchandising and enterprise functions are foundational elements for all retail and consumer product organizations. They are the heart of enabling your brand’s value proposition but rarely are given enough strategic attention. As such, it is critical that these processes and systems are analyzed for fit to ensure they support your company’s current initiatives and long-term vision. Parker Avery will assess how well your core systems and processes are aligned with your business needs, identify where gaps exist in your existing capabilities, and outline a roadmap to address those gaps. We then help identify, select, and implement systems that meet your requirements, as well as design business processes that support your desired future state.

Our experience in developing and implementing forecasting solutions for large, global brands enables our team to help clients attain cutting-edge demand planning capabilities. We help enterprises establish a solid base of demand forecasting by considering business processes, supporting systems, and roles. Doing this right includes cleansing historical data, considering impacts of current events, accounting for promotional lift, estimating lost sales, and considering external data impacts. Further, we provide advanced analytics to help you understand trends and seasonality of products and locations over time. As a result, you will produce more accurate demand forecasts for better planning. Visit our Demand Forecasting page for more information.

Store clustering is an intricate undertaking with a variety of approaches and elements to consider. Effective clustering provides the ability to unleash the true potential of assortment planning and price management capabilities, bringing with it significant financial benefits in terms of sales, margin, and inventory utilization. Leveraging advanced analytics with our store clustering insights, we can help you determine the best approach for your company. As a result, you will be positioned to provide the right mix of products at appropriate price points across locations and channels, ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction and better business results.

We believe the ability to effectively plan and manage your merchandise is more critical than ever. It is no longer sufficient to provide a high-level number as guidance. The planning function is an integral part of buying, managing, and optimizing the flow of product through the supply chain to the end fulfillment point. We can help you establish the proper foundation, organizational structure, processes, and systems to position your business for success.

We have extensive experience helping clients improve sales, margin, and inventory turns through improved assortment and item planning capabilities. We consider differences and nuances in planning approaches and processes to ensure alignment with local market and customer segment intelligence. As such, we help our clients determine appropriate roadmaps for development and evolution of planning capabilities. With deep, hands-on experience with most leading planning solutions, including Oracle, SAS, Blue Yonder, Infor, Aptos, MI9, and Logility, we facilitate the evaluation to help you determine a system that fits your business requirements. Further, we support planning organizations during new role, process, and system deployments through our change management and solution implementation services.

We have deep expertise across a broad array of clients in creating and implementing strategic pricing capabilities. We focus on essential capabilities such as regular price optimization, markdown management, and promotions management. Our services include developing omnichannel pricing and promotional strategies and designing the supporting processes, policies, and organizations, as well as identifying key client requirements for software solutions. Our extensive experience with leading and emergent solution providers helps us assess, select, and implement pricing solutions that best support your desired future state. We also help clients develop roadmaps to address the many pricing and promotions changes engendered by an increasingly omnichannel environment. Visit our Pricing & Promotions Management page to learn more.