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As the retail industry evolves to adopt the latest technological advances to meet the needs of increasingly fickle consumers, and to manage economic fluctuations, marketplace competition has reached new heights. Traditional strategies for establishing differentiation and creating growth have become ineffective. This environment demands that retailers take a new approach to profitably synchronize inventory and space while meeting complex customer demands. Success requires an easy-to-execute, closed-loop advanced planning process that enables retailers to realize sales and inventory improvements while delivering a superior shopping experience to customers.
The i2 Solution: i2 Merchandise Financial Planning
i2 Merchandise Financial Planning is a highly scalable end-to-end merchandise financial planning solution.
With Merchandise Financial Planning, retailers can build and reconcile their financial, product, and store plans, as well as develop a pre-assortment options plan that provides top-down guidance on the assortment breadth and mix, based on targeted selling price, time on offer, and rate of sale. Supported by configurable best-practice workflows, visibility, and proactive exception management, retailers that use Merchandise Financial Planning are achieving consistency and speed in their planning process-leading to improved revenues and margins.
i2 Merchandise Financial Planning provides the rich set of capabilities required to execute a closed-loop planning process that synchronizes performance objectives with downstream planning processes.
Key capabilities of i2 Merchandise Financial Planning can include:
- A robust multi-dimensional planning framework that can support end-to-end planning (both dollar and unit) including strategic planning, merchandise (product) planning, store planning, options planning (as an input to downstream assortment planning process)
- Alignment of strategic merchandise, store, and options plans with a flexible framework for top-down, bottom-up, middle-out, or combination planning
- Management global enterprises at the right level of detail, as the solution is designed to handle plans of almost unlimited scale
- Visibility into exceptions, enabling retailers to focus on having the right information at the right time
- Flexible exceptions handling combined with sophisticated viewing capabilities provide visibility into business-specific exceptions
Benefits of i2 Merchandise Financial Planning can include:
- Increased control over inventory and timing of receipt flows
- Increased revenues and profitability
- Improved alignment between strategy and operations
- Improved exception detection and management for company-wide synchronization
- Improved management of global enterprises at the right level of detail
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