Merchandise Financial Planning
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
Buying and Assortment Management
i2 Buying and Assortment Management is a comprehensive assortment planning solution for the top- and middle-tier retailer.
Challenges faced by retailers include:
- Determining how to cater to target customers, at the local level, with a compelling product selection, pricing, and promotions
- Inability to plan down to detailed style-color levels
- Buying process not integrated with local market needs
- Receipts-driven planning philosophy as opposed to sales-driven
- Difficulty managing assortments in-season based on point-of-sale performance
- Difficulty managing seasonal transitions
- Inability to manage assortment breadth in a manner that’s consistent with top-down guidance
Leveraging the i2 Agile Business Process Platform - Retail, this highly interactive solution enables buying and planning from the early conceptual stage to the final creation of market-tailored store assortments.
The i2 solution is designed to provide retailers with the ability to:
- Bring science to the art of preseason sales forecasting with “pattern-after” intelligence and seasonal sales profiling
- Plan by store cluster using multidimensional attributes and performance measures
- Conduct the buying process in parallel with assortment planning from early concept stage through to receipt planning
- Support constraint-based optimization of receipt flow with respect to an entire supply chain
- Support the complexity of managing assortment down to the style-color or SKU at the local market level
- Plan pricing promotions and markdowns to shape demand, managed inventory, and exploit opportunities
Key capabilties of i2 Buying and Assortment Management can include:
- Profile discovery process in conjunction with sophisticated techniques allows for a robust scientific basis for sales forecast
- The buyer’s worksheet is the repository of style-color attributes and sourcing information, providing both historical and current (real and dummy) style-colors that are available for inclusion in the assortment plan
- Store-group assortments captures the richness of product, store, and shelf attributes required to build an effective, targeted range by store group, together with readily-interpreted summary information for effective reconciliation to the merchandise plan
- Choice of interactive or fully automated in-season planning process using adaptive smoothing forecasting algorithms
- Analytical support helps identify key assortment planning parameters, such as assortment breadth
- History summarization and in-line views support informed decision making on planning the distribution and options using historical “pattern-after” workflows
- Plan different price points across locations by time period
- Include dummy style-colors for “what-if” planning with supporting workflow
- Receipt planning—provides the logic required to generate the receipt flow required to support the sales and inventory requirements dictated by the assortment
- What-if" analysis—ability to make changes and run rapid incremental what-if scenarios
- User-friendly and interactive interface
Key benefits of i2 Buying and Assortment Management can include:
- Improved customer centricity by offering targeted assortments tailored to local market conditions
- Improved plan execution through integrated allocation/replenishment
- Automatic reconciliation to open-to-buy/open-to-receive
- Improved ability to account for seasonality and the buyer’s knowledge of market preferences
- Store sales plans drive receipts that are optimized to minimize inventory in the retail extended supply chain while achieving target turns/sell-through percentage/weeks-of-cover
- Improved targeted markdown decisions to maximize margin and minimize leftover inventory
Allocation and Replenishment Management
i2 Allocation and Replenishment Management is a comprehensive inventory management and distribution solution for retailers.
Allocation and Replenishment Management provides the rich set of capabilities required to tackle today’s challenges and provide a leading edge to retailers so they can better serve their customers and compete effectively.
Capabilities of i2 Allocation and Replenishment Management can include:
- Time-phased demand and replenishment plans that provide visibility into inventory investment and product flow over time, enabling effective collaboration within the organization and with vendors (connected model to support direct-store delivery, vendor-DC-store, vendor-XDock DC-store)
- Highly scalable, multi-period allocation and replenishment planning for both solids/eaches and case-packs/mix-packs
- Inventory analysis and optimization—segmentation of products, order policy/target service-level determination and “what-if” scenarios, calculation of optimal levels, multi-echelon strategy
- Simulation capabilities—based on financial investment, service level, and safety stock interplay
- Support for both hard supply chain constraints (such as item availability; shipping, receiving, and location calendars; effectivity dates; and pack multiples) as well as soft constraints (such as handling and storage capacity at distribution centers and stores, and vendor minimums), with a restricted subset available for interactive plan overrides
- Advanced techniques (in batch mode) for replenishing slow-moving SKUs, including calculating replenishment parameters based on average rate of sale, presentation stock, lead time, and review times
- Integrated planning for turn and promotional items (in batch mode) to ensure coordinated flow and adequate supply for promotions
- Multiple replenishment policies to cater to diverse product segments—reorder point/reorder quantity, reorder point/up-to level, reorder point-to-future target level, min/max, min on hand for different product segmentations
- Item linking and substitutions—one way, two way, phase out, multiple linking, sudden death, effective date
- End-of-season “must-ship” logic to push excess inventory
- Automated purchase order approval based on business rules
- Prioritization can be made on which orders, locations, or customers receive inventory first
- Robust exception-management framework with decision support for expedite candidates, increase supply, increase capacity, and potential stockouts
Benefits of i2 Allocation and Replenishment Management can include:
- Consistency in managing inventory levels holistically across the supply chain across multiple time periods
- Better in-stock positions resulting in higher customer service levels and better promotional effectiveness
- Reduced inventory levels with optimal inventory investments
- Increased inventory turns
- Reduced stock-outs and markdowns
- Efficiency in logistics and distribution costs by better planning around constraints involving storage, handling, container load building, and vendor capacity
- Overall business/productivity improvements due to managing by exceptions and rapid re-planning
Cycle Time Optimization
i2 Cycle Time Optimization accomplishes two key goals. First, it optimizes the procurement spend across the supplier base. Second, it minimizes the concept-to-store cycle time. This is enabled by:
- Establishing a collaborative design and product development process between merchants and the sourcing teams
- Enabling a pre-positioning of material and factory capacity to product that is synchronized with in-store dates
- Creating a differentiated flow of product to the store, driven by product and location segmentation
The i2 Advantage
Unmatched intellectual property
- Collaboration with major retailers and branded suppliers around the world, including Gap, Payless ShoeSource, Nike, VF Corp, adidas, and Woolworths
Real-world tested scalability
- Payless ShoeSource: 1,000 style-colors (x 13 sizes) @ 4,700 stores/52 weeks
- VF Corp: 75 DCs, 100+ plants, 20 cutting centers, and more than 200,000 SKUs
i2 Agile Business Process Platform for Retail
- Reference data model across retail, sourcing, supply chain, and transportation
- Service-oriented architecture to leverage existing system investments
- Modular for incremental growth
Familiar, responsive user interaction paradigm
- Browser and Excel-based user interfaces
- Interactive, incremental planning capability
The i2 team
- Knowledge base of leading practices across retail and consumer goods industries
- Deep industry knowledge, with broad engagement experience in business strategy, change readiness, opportunity assessment, and process consulting across retail, sourcing, supply chain, and transportation domains
- Proven project management team with direct experience in implementing solutions for large retail and national brand companies
i2 customer base
- Strategic partnerships with retail and branded product industry leaders
Want to learn more? Contact Us, call +1-800-800-3288, or contact your nearest i2 sales office.
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