Merchandising Across Channels

By Caterina Pontoriero
Traditionally in retail, merchandising refers to the selection of products a retailer has available for sale and how those products are displayed in-store. The goal is to display products in a way that stimulates interest and entices customers to make a purchase.

Today, retail goes beyond the physical store with more customers shopping online and on their smartphones. As retail continues to expand into multiple channels, merchandising solutions are also expanding to include the appropriate functions to manage these new and emerging channels.

This month’s Vendor Landscape focuses on customer-centric merchandising solutions that work not only on the physical store level, but the online and mobile channels as well. These targeted and end-to-end solutions cover merchandise planning, store planning, store clustering, assortment planning, space planning and allocation/replenishment. RIS lists some of the major merchandising vendors and highlights some recent retailer deployments.

Improved Assortment
The Manitoba Liquor Control Commission (MLCC) uses Aldata’s retail supply chain suite for Merchandising Optimization and Demand-Based Replenishment in its 50 Liquor Mart liquor stores in the Manitoba province of Canada. Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, MLCC is mandated with regulating, distributing and selling alcohol in Manitoba and supplies approximately 1,700 customers and annually processes more than 63,000 orders. The organization uses Aldata to improve assortment and Liquor Mart replenishment processes, improve supply chain efficiency and improve retail reporting and analytics.

Accurate Forecasting
Giant Food Stores is using the Lifecycle Price Optimization and End-to-End Promotion Management merchandising solutions from DemandTec. Key benefits from the solutions include improving the productivity of its pricing team, better aligning specific pricing actions with its corporate pricing strategy, more accurately forecasted promotions and a streamlined deal management process that improves efficiency and reduces errors.

Consumer Insight
Supermarket chain Giant Eagle recently deployed Galleria’s Behavioral Cluster Planning solution, part of the Retail & Category Optimization Suite, to gain insight and analysis into its consumer base. Giant Eagle, which is already using Galleria’s Customer-Centric Merchandising and Promotional Display Optimization solutions, will use the new automated platform to cluster its stores based on product and category performance in order to gain insight into shoppers’ needs and therefore accurately meet customer demand.

Streamlining Processes
Puma recently deployed Vision Merchandising from Jesta to streamline merchandising across the entire enterprise. “We selected Jesta’s Vision Merchandising and Vision SCM based on Jesta’s proven industry experience and solid product offering,” says Michael Specht, global head of retail for Puma.

Winning Decisions
The new Sanuk footwear store in Downtown Disney recently went live with JDS Solutions’ WinRetail Enterprise and POS Management System. Offering the largest selection of products available outside of the company’s online store, Sanuk’s new flagship location sells distinctively designed footwear products for the global outdoor community. WinRetail provides Sanuk managers with timely access to trending information about their business, taking the guesswork out of buying decisions by giving the retailer more accurate and critical information resulting in greater profit margins.

Reducing Inventory
Using solutions from the JustEnough for Retail merchandising platform, Bob’s Stores saw a 16% reduction in average inventory ownership at the store level and a 9% increase in the number of apparel and footwear assortments that have met its in-stock goals. Additionally, the retailer reduced overstocks, product obsolescence and lost sales with improved forecasts that represent true customer demand as well as boosted its ability to maintain some safety stock in a central location rather than in the back rooms of stores.

Multi-Channel support
To support its multi-channel strategy, Cabela’s selected Manhattan’s Replenishment and Assortment Planning solutions. With Replenishment, Cabela’s keeps stores in stock and provides an order projection to its distribution centers for a rolling 90 days so it can better plan labor and truck schedules. Assortment Planning provides efficiencies in other systems, since a good assortment drives improvements in sales, inventory investment and supply chain efficiency.

Ease of Use
Adding to its MI9 Merchant solution, MI9 recently released two new solutions: one focusing on real-time inventory management and the second on point-of-sale and store management. The Retail Hub provides real-time data on demand, allowing retailers to monitor up-to-the-minute sales, current promotions and on-hand inventory using mobile devices or a conventional PC. A new version of MI9 Store, the company’s POS and store management solution, features mobile functionality on tablets and smartphones.

Accelerating Value
Harrods of London and Carhartt are the latest retailers to adopt merchandising solutions from Predictix that include the recently launched series of “Value Accelerator” applications that address promotions and inventory challenges. Promotional Forecasting and Safety Stock Optimization help retailers improve sales and margins, reduce out-of-stocks, improve service levels and optimize their inventory investment. The solutions are designed for fast implementation to enhance existing forecasting and replenishment systems and related business processes.

Analytics Boost sales
The Navy Exchange Service Command (NEXCOM), the $2.5 billion worldwide chain of retail stores and Navy lodges, worked with QuantiSense’s merchandising platform to build an analytics environment to better understand its customers, predict demands and respond appropriately. Using the solution, NEXCOM saw a 5% increase in sales during the 2010 Black Friday sales period compared to the same period the previous year.

Merchandising on the Floor
RBM Technologies is making its merchandising solutions more accessible by making its Visual Merchandising Manager Mobile now available for the Cisco Cius tablet. The Cisco Cius brings VMM out from the back office and on to the sales floor to drive precise execution at the point of sale. With VMM on a tablet, retailers can execute merchandising and marketing tasks faster and with more precision for the best possible customer experience.

Improving Profits
Since 2010, Holiday Station stores experienced success using Revionics’ Life Cycle Price Optimization, which provides analytical detail, forecasts results and provides analysis of sales trends, allowing the retailer to be proactive to demand with pricing strategy and shape consumer behavior. As a result, the convenience store chain improved profit margins at its 400 stores in 10 states and the company is on track to achieve the gross profit improvement it anticipated.

Enhancing Inventory
Modell’s Sporting Goods gained the benefits of reliable and consistent data and better control over and reduction of its inventory by implementing the JDA Merchandise Management System from Retail Process Engineering (RPE). “We needed an end-to-end, robust merchandise management solution that offered core merchandising, warehousing and financial capabilities and could enhance inventory and management efficiencies,” says Hans Kantor, vice president of IT for Modell’s. “This degree of change is seldom tackled and even less frequently successfully accomplished.”

Party Analytics
Party City tested a number of merchandising solutions before selecting the Retail.net Solutions from Tomax for its 750 corporate and franchised locations. The party goods retailer found that the solution “performed as well or better than traditional business intelligence solutions without the upfront hardware and software capital investments required by other solutions,” explains Steve Skiba, CIO of Party City.