Retail Industry Solutions Toolkit
Retail Industry Solution A collection of materials and collaterals for the Retail Industry.
Target Audience
- Decision Marker (Economic Buyer): Chief Operating Officer, Chief Merchandising Officer, Chief Information Officer
- Level 1 Influencer (Champion): VP/Director of Trading, VP/Director e-Commerce, VP/Director Customer, VP/Director Digital, VP/Director Marketing, VP/Director Buying & Merchandising, VP/Director Store Operations, VP/Director Services, VP/Director of IT
- Level 2 Influencer (User): Commercial Manager, Replenishment Manager, Allocations & Buying Manager, Category Manager, Merchadise Manager, Assortment Manager, Analytics Manager
Focus Segments
Board's key GTM focus is on segments with high usage of merchandise planning such as luxury, fashion, general merchandising and speciality retail.
Problem
Retail planning processes can no longer operate in organisational or technology silos, as execution of a unified retail commerce strategy requires complex orchestration across all core processes, such as financial, assortment planning, and allocation & replenishment. Increasing demand volatility, supply shocks and rapidly changing customer shopping missions in challenging retailers through:
- Poor Customer Experience (CX) - impacted by lack of choice, availability or fulfilment options.
- Reduced profitability - decreased sales growth, poor margins, excess inventory and markdowns challenging retail P&L
- Reduced Efficiency - more complex operating models (omni-channel) driving complexity and exposing manual (spreadsheet) or inflexible processes
- Data growth - retail data is growing at 26% CAGR, retailers need to add new insights without adding complexity
Solution
Board Intelligent Retail Planning offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities designed to address the unique challenges of retail planning, providing end-to-to product life-cycle planning from merchandising, demand planning and supply chain.
Board Retail planning solutions rapidly gets you back in control of profitability and redefines how you forecast, plan, and deliver your brand promise in a truly unified commerce model. The time is now to embrace the future of retail planning with Board
Elevator's Pitch
Board Intelligent Retail Planning: Plan. Anticipate. Adapt.
Retail Planning has one purpose — improved business outcomes. Board retail planning solutions are game-changing; leveraging consumer spending insights to curate and inform profitable merchandise, assortment, and replenishment plans that integrate customer demand and market trends into decisions. With Board, dynamically align relevant, responsive, and agile plans across every retail channel, to help you with MFP to markdown and everything in between.
Industry Challenges
1. Siloed retail operations hinder seamless customer experiences: Today's customers expect a seamless shopping experience across all channels, both online and offline. However, many retailers have siloed commerce operations, which can make it difficult to deliver a consistent experience.
2. Volatile demand: Customer trends and shopping behaviors are evolving rapidly making it more difficult to predict sales and manage inventory effectively.
3. Retail data proliferation makes it difficult to gain actionable insights: Retailers are collecting more data than ever before, but this data can be difficult to manage and analyze. As a result, many retailers are unable to gain actionable insights from their data.
Retail solutions overview
Merchandising: Maximizing profits and customer outcomes. Enhance efficiency, quality, and accuracy by synchronizing financial, strategic, and planning processes—enabling better stakeholder collaboration and optimizing product mix across channels, regions, and stores for maximum profits and minimal markdowns
Demand planning: drive better sales and inventory with accurate forecasts that automatically understanding the factors of demand that matter, providing a holistic picture of forward demand that improves forecast accuracy and decision-making across merchandising, supply chain, and operationss
Use cases (by retail solution)
Merchandising | Demand Planning |
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1. Merchandise Financial Planning Enhance efficiency, quality, and accuracy by synchronizing financial, strategic, and planning processes—enabling better stakeholder collaboration and optimizing product mix across channels, regions, and stores for maximum profits and minimal markdown | 1. Forecasting Automatically develop accurate demand forecasting models using AI/ML to make informed decisions. Integrated forecast output to assortment, pricing, and promotion planning. |
2. Assortment Curate the perfect product and channel mix Dynamically respond to customer demand and trends, drive channel profitability with the rapid and flexible assortment planning solution from Board. Develop new levels of precision and automation to identify and execute optimal assortment across all channels | 2. Omni-channel inventory planning Unified demand plans through integration to Board's assortment, allocation, and replenishment planning capabilities. Leverage key analytics on seasonality, promotions and other key events. |
3. Open To Buy (OTB)/WSSI Make informed buying decisions, optimize inventory levels, and improve profitability with a structured and integrated OTB process that enhances planning and execution | 3. New Product Introduction Speed up new product introduction and boost forecast accuracy with sophisticated algorithms to create accurate demand profiles based on similar product attributes and demand patterns |
4. Allocation & Replenishment (A&R) Optimize inventory levels, maximize sales and margins with Board's replenishment and allocation. Synchronize inventory to continuous merchandising plans in a single platform that supports omni-channel, replenishment scenario planning and flexible replenishment methods based on highly accurate and automated ML based forecasting. |
Key differentiators
- Unified planning: Shift from static models to a unified planning system that considers all variables throughout the decision life cycle
- Customer centric Merchandising: Transform consumer behavior into better decisions, fine-tune merchandising and demand planning to meet distinct customer needs
- Omnichannel profitability: Address the complexities of omnichannel retailing by aligning merchandise financial planning with channel profitability and demand
- Agile merchandising: Develop merchandising strategies that maximize profit and adapt to market shifts and volatility without added complexity.
- Flexible inventory control: Maintain pre-season and in-season allocation flexibility to optimize profitability and customer experience
Benefits
- Increased productivity and operational efficiency
- Better control over cost and resources
- Improved profitability and margins
- Increased scalability and flexibility
- Better control and risk management
The Value of Improved Retail Planning
Improved planning across just four key merchandise planning functions can yield immediate business improvement of up to 37% ROI plus improvements in customer satisfaction, productivity, asset usage, price conversion, basket sizes, and more. Other areas of improvement seen with enhanced planning solutions include:
- Demand planning – 5 to 10% ROI
- Assortment – 8% on go-live
- Inventory planning – 35% improvement in customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
Source: IDC
Customer references by industry
Board has over 150 retail customers globally, working with leading retail brands such as Burberry and Kering.
Fashion, Apparel | General Merchandising | Speciality | Grocery |
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Key customer quotes | |
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Sweaty Betty | "Board is an effective solution that challenged us to view our stock package in novel ways." |
Betty Barclay | "Board convinced us with its high performance and user-friendliness. Loading data sets and performing analyses is much faster than in the previous system. Creating new planning applications is programming-free, making it very easy," said Florian Graf, Director Merchandise Planning and Allocation at Betty Barclay Group. "We are starting with Merchandise Financial Planning but have our eyes on further data applications." |
Euronics | "We really benefit from increased efficiency. Due to the integrated data management capabilities, we can plan and analyze across multiple dimensions in a short timeframe. We are also more efficient in our planning and reporting as we are no longer dealing with interface and system discontinuities." |
M&S | "Even a 0.1% improvement in process effectiveness with our scale can deliver benefits measured in millions of pounds. The business used to forecast on a much higher level as manual tools couldn’t deliver the granularity needed, but with Board this is changing completely." |
Slowear | "It is not easy to meet all strategic, financial and operational planning and analytics needs, including merchandise and sales planning. But Board did it with a single platform." |
Harvey Nichols | "Users are now able to have the data that they require at their fingertips, allowing them to concentrate on the analysis they should be doing, rather than sitting around waiting for the reports to be produced. The time/cost benefit to the business is significant and as we discover more ways of utilizing Board that can only grow." |
Discovery Questions
Key qualification |
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Nice to have |
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Competive insights
Platforms | Specialized retail vendors | Specialized supply chain vendors |
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Key Assets
The Key Assets of the Retail Industry Solution Toolkit are stored in a dedicated folder in our Partner Library.
Click here to access the Retail Industry Solution Toolkit folder.
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